Susanna Mayer

Documentation and analysis of children’s experience: an ongoing collegial activity for early childhood professionals

Systematic documentation and analysis of educational practice can be a powerful tool for continuous support to the professionalism of early childhood education practitioners. This paper discusses data from a three-year action-research initiative carried out by a research agency in collaboration with a network of Italian municipal nido services. The action research aimed at elaborating and implementing documentation procedures that nido practitioners could accomplish continuously and that could form the basis of a collegial reflection on children’s experience and the improvement of practices. The analysis of practitioners’ discussions about weaknesses and strengths of the new procedures shows how they could be inscribed within the framework of their current professional engagement and support their processes of reflexivity. The analysis also highlights the important role of collegiality in sustaining practitioners’ analysis, evaluation and improvement of their practice.

Object Substitution: Its Nature and Function in Early Pretend Play

A theoretical reappraisal of the meaning of object substitution in the development of children’s representational abilities is suggested, and a functional distinction between five types of object subs

Towards the use of symbol: Play with objects and communication with adults and peers in the second year☆

Abstract This study investigates the relationship between the onset, the development, and the increase of conventional acts spontaneously exhibited by toddlers in play with objects and in communication with adults and peers within one play context. Five triads of same-age familiar children (8, 13, 18, 24, and 27 months) and on adult were video-taped while playing with familiar objects. All the communicative acts addressed to adult and peers and actions with objects were identified and coded. Conventional acts and the ability to combine them appear earlier in actions with objects. Although from 18 months conventional acts increase dramatically in both domains, they play a different role in doing than in communicating. In communication, the use of language leads to a substantial increase in communicative production itself. At all ages, children are highly motivated to communicate with both adults and peers. As soon as language is acquired, it becomes the predominant modality of communication with both partners.

Toddlers’ Participation in Joint Activities with Peers in nido

Socialization with peers is one of the main goals of early childhood education and care outside of the family but the processes of young children’s sociality in ECEC centres are still to be fully understood. This chapter presents an analysis of toddler’s sociality with peers during their everyday life in an ECEC centre, based on ethnographic data (videos and written notes) collected during a whole morning within the toddler program of a municipal nido in Italy. It highlights that in a group situation children’s attention is aroused by a multiplicity of social stimuli and that they often participate in joint activities with peers. The analysis of toddlers’ participation shows that both social and cognitive processes converge in children’s sociality with peers and contribute to make the ECEC experience an important step in the course of their life. Implications for educational practices in ECEC centres are also discussed.