Teaching activities with toddlers: Considerations on theoretical and empirical grounds

Introduction

This study addresses the issue of the youngest (aged 1–2 years old) children’s participation in teaching activities in preschool. Teaching is clearly associated with formal schooling, something that children globally meet from the age of 4 to 7 (Bingham & Whitebread, 2018). In the Swedish preschool curriculum, only recently has teaching been emphasized as a task for preschool teachers (SKOLFS, 2018:50, 2018), even if it has been stated in the Educational Act since 2010 (SFS 2010:800). Sweden follows the so-called Nordic model, which means having a unified system of Early Childhood Education and Care (ECEC) that does not separate between childcare and preschool (Greve & Hansen, 2018). That teaching is incorporated in the preschool curriculum therefore means that teaching is meant to be an activity for all children, for the 4–6-year-olds as well as for the 1–3-year-olds. This has caused confusion among professionals and led to much debate: What is the purpose – should we now have school for toddlers? To teach children goes against the tradition of preschool as a play-based and child-centered institution (Bingham & Whitebread, 2018; Eidevald & Engdahl, 2018; Pyle & Danniels, 2017).

The contested nature of the relationship between teaching and the youngest children in preschool actualizes the need for research and more specifically, as we will argue, a need for gaining insight into the processes of teaching with young children and to theoretically conceptualize teaching with these participants in contemporary ECEC. This kind of knowledge is required to nuance the debate and policy-making when it comes to teaching, and further, school readiness (Bingham & Whitebread, 2018). This heated debate is not exclusive to Sweden; it is reportedly prominent not only in other Nordic countries more generally (e.g., Broström, 2017), but also in other parts of the world, e.g., Australia (Fleer et al., 2018). Scholars from different points of departure argue that infants and toddlers have been overlooked in research and that there is a particular lack of knowledge about this age group (Greve & Hansen, 2018). While the relationship between teaching and the child’s later schooling provides a background of our discussion, it is imperative to understand that teaching is not exclusive to schooling, or indeed to educational institutions. Teaching, as conceptualized in terms of PRECEC, denotes a mutually constituted activity where someone attempts to challenge and support someone else to see, or realize, something that is new to him or her. This responsive activity is by the more experienced participant (typically the preschool teacher) a conscious effort to facilitate learning, and these actions are made in response to the learner’s response (cf. Barnett, 1973). Hence, this kind of practice is not exclusive to schools, rather it denotes a mutually constituted activity having certain characteristics that could be seen also among friends, between a parent and a child, or other participants, such as shifting between and relating imagination (as if) and culturally established knowledge (as is). (We will elaborate on the concept of teaching within PRECEC later, in light of our empirical investigation).

The present study aims to contribute with knowledge about what participating in teaching activities requires of children and teachers, and to what extent very young children, such as toddlers, are able to do so. We will approach these issues both as a theoretical question, taking pedagogical and psychological research into account, and as an empirical question, providing an in-depth analysis of empirical data where a preschool teacher work with children aged 1–2 years of age in a series of teaching activities.

Research on teaching with toddlers

This research field is dominated by studies addressing teaching toddlers with special needs, such as autism (e.g., Fey et al., 2013; Vedora & Grandelski, 2014), including training and testing different methods for facilitating language development and/or prosocial behaviour. There is also another prominent strand, in part overlapping with the first one, investigating teachers’ beliefs about teaching toddlers (e.g., Berthelsen & Brownlee, 2007; Clarke et al., 2019; Recchia & Eun, 2018). This research is typically based on interviews or, to a lesser degree, questionnaires. Hence, this research builds on secondary data sources (capturing how teachers talk about and reflect on teaching) rather than a first-hand account (i.e., video or audio recordings of interaction in actual teaching activities). The latter is, in contrast, what we will build on in the present study. Hence, the difference between the present study and the dominant strands of research on toddlers and teaching are methodological and research focus.

Teacher–infant dialogues were studied in an education and care setting by White et al. (2015). Three features were found to characterize such dialogues: (i) teachers’ initiations for dialogue where more successful, in terms of infants’ responses, when they used both verbal and non-verbal forms of language; (ii) when initiated in both verbal and non-verbal language, responses were more likely to also contain both kinds of language use; and (iii) the forms of language used where ‘mirrored’ by the other partner, whether the infant or the teacher. The White et al. (2015) study is in part similar to the present one, primarily in building on partly the same theoretical ground. However, in the present study, rather than mapping the forms of language used, we analyze the process of communication, and with a particular interest in a theoretically informed concept of teaching with the youngest children in ECEC. In another study of infants–teacher interaction, Jung (2013) investigated what roles teachers take in children’s play. How the teachers shifted between a number of roles where illustrated and collaboratively illustrate features of “playful caregiving” (p. 197). The present study differs from the Jung (2013) study in looking at a mutually constituted and related series of activities rather than how teachers enter into and take different roles in infants’ play.

From the premise that “from the start, the child becomes readily attuned to ‘making a lot out of a little’ by combination” (Bruner, 1983, p. 29; cf. Engdahl, 2011; Lindahl & Pramling Samuelsson, 2002), interaction between ECEC teachers and 1- to 3-year-old children were studied. In these activities, the participants had access to buttons (of many kinds, shapes, colours) and containers, and the analysis clarifies how the objects were semiotically mediated and what activities evolved. Arguing that different learning is afforded children contingent on semiotic mediation, a repertoire of activities is reported, including aesthetic ones, labelling, finding out what can be done with the buttons, attending to similarities and differences between specimens, counting, and showing. Intersecting these different activities was a more fundamental distinction, schematically presented in terms of “Static: As is (relative size, colour), The objects per se, conventional, Stay in what is at hand (the objects),” on the one hand, and “Dynamic: As if (pretend play, looks like, metaphorical speech), The activities afforded by the objects (including aesthetic qualities: tactile and sounding), A-conventional (creative), Associate, (re)connect with what is outside the current situation” (Pramling & Pramling Samuelsson, 2010, p. 28), on the other hand. A conclusion critical also to our present study is that this implies that teaching is not restricted to culturally-established knowing (as is), but also can encompass pretense, fantasy (as if ).

Some meta-studies have also been published; one covers Swedish studies of toddlers in preschool where the following topics of research can be found: children’s learning, values in everyday interaction, and preschool culture (Johansson & Emilson, 2010). Another strand of research on toddlers in ECEC concerns what has been labelled “toddling style” (Løkken, 2000) and adults’ position towards this (Quiñones & Pursi, 2020), leading to an emphasis on the importance of adults participating in play with children. In other overviews of research on toddlers in preschool, a gap in knowledge is identified concerning didactic questions about the youngest children, and a particular challenge that is identified regards theorizing the relationship between learning and play (Bjørnestad & Pramling Samuelsson, 2012; Greve & Hansen, 2018). In the present study, we will contribute to illuminating didactic questions with our interests in teaching activities and aspects of play.

Summarizing the major findings of a research project on toddlers in preschool in New Zealand, Dalli et al. (2011) emphasize that among teachers working with this age group, there was a strong emphasis on that children’s development unfolds naturally and that the teacher’ role meant “writing herself out of the learning equation” (p. 6). Children’s independent exploration was seen as the benchmark for educational activities. Furthermore, the participating teachers perceived their work with toddlers to be based on intuition and feeling.

Two studies, albeit with a different focus than the present study, are of particular interest in this context. Kawakami (2014) traces the foundations of teaching behavior in humans. Based on audio-recordings of free play from Japanese preschools, 17 children were followed over time. Documenting all toddler behaviors directed towards the observer during these sessions, “toddlers’ teaching behaviors” (p. 174) were categorized. The toddlers’ behavior addressing the observer increased with each block. The toddlers displayed such actions as showing, pointing, vocalizing, verbalizing, and teaching. Verbalizations grew dramatically, as would be expected from children’s development during these years. Explaining was observed in children as young as 17 months. In a follow-up study, also based on audio-recordings of toddlers in free play in preschool, Kawakami and Takai-Kawakami (2015) investigated the competences of these young children as social beings. One-year-olds and children under the age of 12 months were observed. The toddlers’ peer-directed behavior was analyzed. These behaviors included caring, altruistic, and teaching behaviors. Teaching behaviors were only observed in the one-year group. The findings consist of a differentiated set of social behaviors, including showing toddlers playing with imaginary entities. Two conclusions drawn, “the development of peer-relationships was reflected in language development,” and “toddlers are ‘caregivers’ and not just care-receivers” (p. 111; see also, Cooper & Quiñones, 2022).

While these two studies concern the teaching that toddlers do, rather than what we will study, how children together with a preschool teacher participate in teaching as a mutually constituted activity, they are relevant in showing that already these young children do engage in imaginary activity (as if ), and particularly, their abilities and willingness to respond in a considered manner to their peers and adjacent adults.

Theorizing teaching

The theoretical framework referred to by the acronym PRECEC (Pramling et al., 2019) consists of a set or systematically related concepts, including responsivity, teaching, play, the distinction between as if and as is, the inherent tension between temporarily sufficient intersubjectivity (Rommetveit, 1974) and alterity, and the freedom to (van Oers, 2014) of play.

Basic to PRECEC is responsivity. This concept refers to participants – for example preschool teachers – being responsive to children on an action-for-action basis. If participants interact verbally, this would be an utterance-for-utterance basis (and represented in transcripts as turn-by-turn). However, participants’ actions may or may not be conducted with verbal means. In the context of the present study, with toddlers, other forms of participatory actions may be premised to be critical to how activities evolve (see also, Kultti, 2013). The concept of responsivity highlights communicative processes, with communication conceptualized as making common (Pramling & Säljö, 2015) and encompassing actions carried out with other semiotic means than verbal language exclusively.

Teaching is in this perspective understood as an activity co-constituted by participants’ responsive actions, where they coordinate themselves enough to be able to go on with a joint activity, and which has certain characteristics: Critical to the kind of teaching theorized in terms of PRECEC is that participants – preschool teachers and children – go between and relate as if and as is. What is here referred to as as if denotes what Vaihinger (1924/2001) has also called conscious fictions. One example of a conscious fiction is play. However, it is important to realize that there are other activities than play that exemplify as-if thinking, for instance theorizing in science and fiction (literature). The distinction between as if and as is is inherently related to how play is approached from this theoretical point of view. Recognizing the futility of trying to define, in a traditional sense, play in a way that encompasses all forms of activity referred to by this term and being exclusive to these vis-à-vis adjacent phenomena (see e.g., Sutton-Smith, 1997, for a classic meta-discussion of this issue), we choose not to define what play is (as something in and of itself, sui generis). Instead, in PRECEC play is considered as the participants’ concern. That is, what the participants – children and preschool teachers – themselves indicate to each other (and thus also make discernable to the analyst) that they take as play or not is taken seriously. Participants signal how they take – intend – their actions as play or not play by speaking and in other ways acting in terms of as if and as is, respectively. With this analytical stance, we cannot ask whether an activity observed is (really) play or not. Instead, we ask and analyze what the participants themselves take the activity they engage in as. This is therefore an analytical stance that does not make us rationally blind to unexpected forms that play can take (what falls within respectively outside a particular definition of play) and allows us to be analytically responsive to the participants’ (children’s and teachers’) perspectives. Hence, the participants themselves, importantly including the children, are positioned as agents (subjects) rather than objects of study. Teaching is within the framework of PRECEC understood as a communicative activity (Pramling, 2022). However, while participation in all communication is potentially educative (i.e., we always learn something), not all communication constitutes a case of teaching. The concept of teaching, in this theoretical account, implies communication with particular features, as clarified above (and developed in the referred literature).

Developmental foundations for participating in teaching activities

Conceptualizing teaching as a mutually constituted activity (with certain characteristics) raises the question of what participating in such activity requires of children, and to what extent very young children, such as toddlers, are able to do so. We must therefore look into the developmental foundations for being able to take part in teaching. What is today well-established knowledge is that children are not born as blank slates (tabula rasa), but are socially responsive from birth (in fact, it could be argued, already before being born). From the very beginning, the infant is socially responsive to the responses of the primary caregivers, in what has been referred to as proto-conversation or “communicative musicality” (Malloch & Trevarthen, 2009): responding in a to-and-fro manner. However, in order to be able to participate in the cultural activity of teaching, something else has to develop. We know this from the developmental research of Michael Tomasello (1999). Studying toddlers engaged with an object, at the age of approximately six months, he was able to show that if another person entered the situation, the toddler either ignored the person, continuing to be engaged with the object, or abandoned the object and focused on the person. Hence, children at this age are able to participate in a dyadic relationship. When observing toddlers at the age of approximately twelve months, it was found that they were now able to continue engaging with the object and to engage with the person entering. Hence, they were now able to participate in a triadic relationship. When the young child is able to make other participants in interaction attentive to the object that she/he wants the other person to see, through pointing and/or sound making (e.g., “da”), and when the other participant responds and confirms, joint attention is established. Being able to take part in a triadic relationship, it could be argued, metaphorically speaking constitutes the molecule of teaching. That is, two (or more) persons are mutually engaged in something third. Without such coordination, teaching as a cultural activity cannot take place. Hence, developmentally, toddlers can engage in teaching, as here understood, from approximately twelve months of age. These observations also remind us that teaching is not necessarily carried out with verbal means (by all participants). However, even if the young child (the toddler) does not speak, teachers may well (also) use verbal means in such activities. Note that this does not say anything about group-size or anything else related to the formal setting of teaching in ECEC; the only claims made here are about the nature of communication among participants in a teaching activity. It could theoretically be communication between a caregiver and a child, a teacher and a group of children or among peers. However, our interest is directed to teaching in the setting of preschool and the task of the preschool teacher, since this is a setting – in Sweden, where we conduct our study, but also in many other countries – framed by a curriculum and an explicit task to teach also the youngest children.

In a sense, the child is born into a mediated world (Shotter, 1993), that is, a world that is ordered. She is introduced to and guided into this ordered world by caregivers. However, with the advent of the child’s first language, her experience will be increasingly linguistically structured (Rommetveit, 1985), that is, she will learn to perceive the world in terms of the cultural tool-kit (Wells, 2007) of language (cf. Vygotsky, 1998). Developmental psychologist, Katherine Nelson (1996), succinctly phrases this when she argues:

Thus to a large extent in the course of human childhood, between about 2 and 6 years of age, language and the surrounding culture takes over the human mind. It is during these years that biology ‘hands over’ development to the social world. (p. 325)

While highlighting the critical importance of language to the child’s evolving understanding of the world, it is important to remember that an important principle of modern developmental psychology is that developmental trajectories (e.g., language, cognition, motor development) are inherently related (Zelazo, 2013). This also means that the importance of other modes of participation are not replaced by the advent of language. Rather, the repertoire of ways of acting (perceiving, making sense, participating) increases (rather than one replacing a former).

Teaching understood as a particular kind of mutually constituted activity highlights communicative processes. Communication can be understood as a field of tension between temporarily sufficient intersubjectivity (Rommetveit, 1974) and alterity (Wertsch, 1998). As clarified by Rommetveit (1974), intersubjectivity is negotiated and at best temporary, partial, and sufficient for participants to go on with a joint activity, rather than being engaged in separate ones, talking past each other. Intersubjectivity, from this perspective, can also be understood as the “attunement to the attunement of the other” (Marková, 2003, p. 252). Furthermore, intersubjectivity, Rommetveit (1974, p. 56) argues, “has to be taken for granted in order to be achieved.” In tension with this communicative process, there is always differences between participants’ point of view, experience and ways of participating, what Wertsch (1998) calls alterity. Within the framework of PRECEC, alterity is further specified to stand for actions to take an activity in what other participants indicate to be an unexpected direction (Pramling et al., 2019). Some intersubjectivity is necessary for participants to be able to engage in a mutual activity (e.g., playing together, taking part in teaching) and some alterity – and responding to alterity – is critical in order for activities not to stagnate, only repeat. Hence, how participants negotiate to temporarily establish partial intersubjectivity and how to respond to alterity will be critical to how activities develop and what participants can learn in and from participating in these.

The empirical study

The empirical data we will use to examine teaching activities in situ with toddlers is from a combined research and developmental project conducted in Swedish preschools (Pramling et al., 2019). The basic design of the project was to let preschool teachers themselves document activities in their own practice using computer tablets. Regularly (5–6 times a year) the teachers and researchers had meetings at the university. On these occasions, the researchers gave lectures on conceptual resources for analyzing teaching and play, and the teachers brought their recordings and worked in groups, together with other teachers and researchers, discussing the activities observed. After the meetings, the researchers transcribed the recordings and conducted the analyses. In this study, we have focused on one of the teacher’s documentation in a late phase of the project, meaning that she was well familiar with challenge in focus at the time: to develop knowledge about teaching in response to play. At a previous meeting we had discussed the important aspect of following play activities over time, and to the next meeting, this teacher contributed with four short recordings of sequences, each lasting 3–7 minutes, recorded during a period of a few weeks, that she found to be related with respect to the content. She was part of a group in the project that had an explicit interest in the arts, and in her case particularly music. The children at the preschool where she works are 1–3 years old. The participating children in the study are all under two years: “Anders”: 1.10 (one year and 10 months) “Rosa”: 1.8, “Billy”: 1.10, “Ville”: 1.10, “Ronny”: 1.10, and “Valter”: 1.7. A colleague of the teacher handled the computer tablet, while she herself interacted with the children. In the first recording, one child participated. This child was an active participant in the following activities too, where he was joined by four other children.

Empirical findings

In this section, we present our findings through an analysis closely adjacent to excerpts of transcripts from the activities. Over the four excerpts, we will analytically show how the participants over time establish a mutual activity, an activity that evolves in response to the children’s initiative (which, in turn, is a response to something previously introduced by the teachers: particular nursery rhymes). The activity develops through four phases: (i) the child spontaneously relating a board game to a song (a nursery rhyme); (ii) the teacher initiating a continuation activity in which the song becomes a part, and adds beating out the pulse of the song; (iii) the teacher opening up for play, which builds on beating out the pulse on a toy and singing, and the children introducing dancing; and (iv) to play, sing and dance being established as a play activity with additional participants.

Discussion and conclusions

With this study, we aimed at contributing with knowledge about what participating in teaching activities requires of children and teachers, and to what extent very young children, such as toddlers, are able to do so. First, we pointed out a theoretical foundation as the premise of teaching activities, grounded in the work of Tomasello (1999): At least two persons being mutually engaged in something third. We call this, in metaphoric terms, the molecule of teaching. The mutual engagement in something third constitutes an ongoing communicative challenge to keep up sufficient intersubjectivity among participants in an activity (Rommetveit, 1974), for children as well as for adults. But, as Tomasello (1999) points out, children are normally able to take part in these kind of triadic relationships from approximately one year of age. Hence, based on this, we can conclude that children should be developmentally prepared for participating in teaching activities, as early as from when they are 1 year old (see particularly, Kawakami, 2014; Kawakami & Takai-Kawakami, 2015). However, if equating teaching with going to school (i.e., participating in traditional school practices, such as whole-class instruction where the child has little direct interaction with the teacher due to the group size and ways of organizing activities), toddlers may not be ready for school. Therefore, it is imperative, we argue, to separate the concept of teaching from the concept of schooling. Teaching in preschool does not have to look like what it does in the school classroom; neither does it have to be the same for the 2-year-olds as for the 5-year-olds. The challenge the children face, from what is analytically discernable in the data of the present study, is not to hear the pulse or develop their timing or similar. Rather, their challenge is to make themselves understood with their communicative resources.

In this article, we also wanted to provide examples of what teaching with the youngest children could mean, what its characteristic features might be. Our findings, thus, contribute to theoretical accounts of the meaning of teaching with toddlers, something that has been found to be lacking (see Bjørnestad & Pramling Samuelsson, 2012; Greve & Hansen, 2018, for discussions) and only recently starting to emerge in more closely adjacent fields of study (e.g., Alcock, 2016). From the empirical examination of a series of related activities from a preschool, we can conclude that teaching activities – as understood from the theoretical point of view of PRECEC – with toddlers can be characterized by three critical actions by the teacher. By teachers carrying out these actions, toddlers can become participants in meaningful teaching activities.

Firstly, the communication between children and the teacher presumes (cf. Rommetveit, 1974, on how intersubjectivity has to be taken for granted to be achieved) them sharing attention on something third. In the empirical data this is found to happen through (a) the children’s embodied ways of expressions are listened to and taken into account by the teacher. The teacher in this study is shown to interpret the children’s expressions in a way that they do not show that they at this time by themselves are able to; it is the teacher who verbalizes and meta-comments on what the young children may mean by their expressions (such as, in the present case: “watch out”). Making sense of what children express with their voice and other means implies interpreting what they may mean, rather than simply responding to what they say or do; that is, responsivity acknowledges the child’s (perceived) intention with their actions. Further on, shared attention is made possible through (b) the teacher and the children have, at least partly, a shared frame of reference (in the present case, a repertoire of songs), and (c) that there is a consistency between activities that enables them to develop their communication over time. Each of the analyzed activities in this study may seem volatile, but taken together, it become obvious that what is established as an activity is taken up on the next occasion, and then is built upon further.

Secondly, a critical task for the teacher is meta-communicating throughout the activities. In the data, this kind of communication is seen to serve several functions. It helps weaving together not only here-and-now, but also there-and-then, which we have referred to as diachronic responsivity. By meta-communicating different suggestions from the children, these are weaved together in a play activity, for example singing and carpeting. It is also meta-communication that makes the play activity a didactical situation, in the sense that the teacher directs the children’s attention to a content (in this case the pulse of the music). In the activities analyzed in this study, the teacher has consistently, in response to its initiation in a child’s expression, focused on pulse. This is evident in her beating out the pulse to the song every time she sings, and in her encouraging the children to play along by beating on the pound-a-peg. But on one occasion, at the end of this series of activities, she also verbalizes what they do with a musical term: time.

Thirdly, the playfulness throughout the activity, characterized by the openness created by the teacher framing the activity as if, enables the children to participate as legitimate participants. If Anders wants to use the snail in the game, not as a part of the game but as a figure to sing about, then this is welcomed – his initiative is listened to and responded to by the teacher. Acknowledging a child’s intention and contributions implies recognizing him or her as a person capable of communicating intentions and emotions. Hence, responding to a child’s actions entails seeing the child as a psychological being, who lives in and through others’ responsivity (this idea is, of course, preceded by the famous work of Mead, 1934/1967). Phrased differently, there is an inherent ethical imperative in responding to another’s – for example a child’s – utterances and other actions as intentional.

That the teacher verbalizes the children’s expressions and other actions (e.g., showing an object) in terms of shared frames of references, is arguably necessary to constitute a teaching activity with young children. This indicates that responsivity in activities that may be referred to as teaching requires sensitivity on the part of the teacher (cf. Alcock, 2016), which, as we have already mentioned, is not only important to knowledge-building but also to identity-formation (recognizing the child as an individual who participates in mutual activities by giving contributions that are acknowledged and responded to). This reasoning further implies that it is arbitrary to draw any clear line of demarcation between teaching as contributing to children’s learning and caring for their emotional well-being.

When looking closely at the activities in situ, as in the present study, the cardinal ability for the adult participating in teaching with toddlers, as we see it, is to be sensitive to their attempts to communicate their wishes, intentions, emotions, and ideas. This is decisive for having meaningful teaching activities with toddlers that promote children’s identity formation as knower/contributor and agency, which are, arguably, more fundamental and generative outcomes of participating in teaching than appropriating particular domain-specific knowing.

Acknowledgements

The research here reported was funded by a grant from the Swedish Institute for Educational Research (Skolfi 2016/112), which we gratefully acknowledge. We would also like to extend our gratitude to the children and their caregivers, and the teachers participating in the study, making our work possible.