Early childhood education staff’s experiences of changing work patterns during the COVID-19 pandemic in Finland

Authors

• Susanna Gillberg Ebeneser-säätiö
• Inkeri Ruokonen Turun yliopisto

DOI: https://doi.org/10.33350/ka.111295

Keywords:

covid-19, early childhood education, early childhood education staff, work community, pedagogy, distance learning, contemporary collecting

Abstract

The COVID-19 pandemic led to exceptional circumstances in Finnish early childhood education and care (ECEC). This study aims to document how ECEC staff experienced these circumstances between March and June 2020. The data comes from an online questionnaire administered by the Helsinki Kindergarten Museum for the purposes of contemporary collecting. Overall, 587 ECEC employees from across Finland took the survey between 26 March and 30 June 2020. This material was analysed according to the principles of data-driven qualitative content analysis. The material was reduced and grouped by extracting the responses’ core messages, which formed simplified themes for interpretation. The results show that the experiences of ECEC staff varied. In some work communities, the exceptional situation was dealt with mainly through the distribution of official bulletins; in other communities, joint everyday discussions were important. During the period in question, staff had more time to devote to ECEC planning and arranging learning environments. Changes were also reported in ECEC pedagogy. Some ECEC centres began providing remote pedagogy for children at home, though there were no general guidelines or tools for this kind of teaching. The exceptional circumstances brought on by the pandemic were experienced as a crisis in the ECEC sector. The heads of ECEC centres played an important role in leading staff through this crisis. The findings show the support needed by ECEC staff to manage their daily work at the beginning of the pandemic.