A certain kind of talk takes place in Swedish preschools that most people who are not in early childhood education have never given much thought to. A teacher sits down with a small group of three or four-year-olds and asks them what they think happens to a rubbish bottle when it is thrown away. The kids answer with a level of seriousness that surprises. Some aren’t right. Some of them are amazingly close. Some of them say things that make the teacher stop what they’re saying.This is not an accident. Ingrid Pramling Samuelsson says that this is exactly the point.
Pramling Samuelsson has spent the better part of four decades changing the way people around the world think about early childhood education. He has a simple view that sounds easy until you think about it: childhood is not a rehearsal. It’s not a place to wait for real life to start. What a three-year-old learns on a Tuesday morning—who listens to them, if their ideas are taken seriously, and how a teacher reacts when they say something out of the blue—is not preparation. They are the thing itself.
Her work, which was partly funded by OMEP (the World Organization for Early Childhood Education), has helped bring this idea to the attention of policymakers, curriculum designers, and teachers in dozens of countries. Some of her most important beliefs were put to the test by a big Swedish research project called Sustainable Preschool. About 200 early childhood teachers took part in it. The results, which came from conversations between teachers and students about sustainability, were both helpful and sometimes upsetting.
The researchers found that teachers talk to kids in a lot of different ways. It looked like three main patterns. The study called what some teachers did “joint meaning-making,” which is a back-and-forth where the child’s point of view really affected where the conversation went. Others went into a question-and-answer pattern that was basically a test to see how well the kids remembered certain facts. A third group did not have any plans and just followed the kids wherever they were interested. There were big differences between them. They showed something deeper: what the teacher thought a child was at their core.
You can’t help but notice how much depends on that belief. A teacher who thinks of a four-year-old as still learning will ask very different questions than a teacher who thinks of the same child as already being able to think, experience, and feel. The study, which uses decades of research on infant development, such as Daniel Stern’s important work on intersubjectivity, makes a pretty strong case for the second view. Children interact with others from the very beginning of their lives. They can read emotions from faces and figure out what things mean through conversation long before they have words for it.
In Sweden, this is more than just ideas. It’s written into the law of the country. In Swedish preschool, learning, language, and identity are all seen as connected. It tells teachers directly that they need to help kids feel responsible for sustainable development, not as a duty they will have to do in the future, but as something that is important to them now. The Sustainable Preschool project showed that it’s a whole different matter whether that requirement is actually carried out in the classroom. You can’t be a good teacher while having sixteen kids and a busy morning. You need to know what good teaching looks like.
Pramling Samuelsson has gone back to a certain part of OMEP’s 2010 global study (which included almost 10,000 casual interviews with young children in many countries) more than once. There were interviews with young children. The teachers who did them thought the kids would know very little about sustainability. They were wrong about what they found. The kids knew more than the adults thought. They had thoughts. They were scared. They had thoughts. The grown-ups had never thought to ask.
That difference—between what kids feel and what adults think they feel—may be what Pramling Samuelsson’s career is all about. Teaching teachers how to have better conversations is the solution she keeps coming back to, even though it doesn’t sound very exciting. These aren’t necessarily longer or more structured talks, but talks where the teacher really wants to know what the child thinks. Which means the answer isn’t known before the question is asked. Change—the chance that a child will say something that completely changes the direction of the conversation—is welcomed instead of being quietly redirected.
It’s still not clear how widely this method can be used or how quickly it can be adopted by programs that train teachers. Seeing more and more research, it’s clear that the question of how adults talk to very young children is not as soft as it sounds. It has to do with identity, democracy, sustainability, and what it means to take someone seriously. Even if they are only four years old and don’t know what to do with a plastic bottle.
