The aim is to illustrate practical analysing tools that facilitate investigations and critical reflections of situated teaching and learning. Early Childhood Education needs to open up for pluralistic pedagogy and move away from transmissive pedagogy (Formosinho & Formosinho 2016). Early childhood research seldom concerns teaching and learning activities in practice (Ryan and Goffin, 2008) and we argue for the need to open up the “black box” showing what teacher do when they teach, and what children learn in the teaching process (Lave 1993). In this work we turn to John Dewey’spragmatism, his view on meaning making (Dewey 1938/2015; Dewey 1958/2009) and functional coordination of actions(Garrison 2001). Data were collected using video-recordings of an activity in preschool practice. The tools used in the qualitative analyses were Practical Epistemology Analysis (Wickman & Östman, 2002) and Epistemological Move Analysis(Lidar, Lundqvist & Östman 2006). The study follows the Swedish Research Council's (2017) ethical rules and guidelines for good research practice. Informed consent was given by parents. The children were asked verbally and also informed that they could say ‘no’, at any time. The results show teaching and meaning making processes as multifaceted and dynamic, including teaching toward practical and intellectual learning as well as socialization and individual development. This way of document and assess teaching and learning can be used when evaluating and developing preschool education. By using these analysing methods the teachers can reflect over their own teaching approaches as well as over children’s learning processes and learning content. 

Preschool teachers in Sweden are expected to document children's learning and assess their learning outcomes, for the purpose of long-term evaluation and to develop the educational preschool practice. Previous research shows that the tools for documenting individual learning are particularly focusing on children's cognitive knowledge, while the tools for evaluating the preschool practice are developed for standardized assessment and teachers' self-reflection. The purpose of this study is to present and illustrate an action-based tool that (i) facilitates documentation and assessment of children's multifaceted learning and (ii) combine and interweave individual learning with situated teaching approaches and evaluation of the preschool practice at institutional level. The action-based methodological framework takes a starting point in John Dewey's pragmatism, transactions and functions of education including qualification, socialization and person-formation. Two analytical approaches; Practical Epistemology Analysis (PEA) and Epistemological Move Analysis (EMA) are used to clarify and illustrate individual, social and institutional dimensions of learning from four sequences of one preschool activity including four children and one teacher talking about a fairy tale. We argue that this tool for assessment and evaluation facilitates action-based reflection and discussion about relations between children's individual learning and institutional norms and values.

This thesis aims to contribute to the knowledge of children’s meaning-making by focusing on processes and content in preschool practice. Meaning-making is understood as a situated process that emerges in the mutual interplay of a child’s previous and current experiences and the preschool practice in which the child participates and acts. Content describes what children create meaning about. The study is theoretically grounded in a sociocultural understanding of human development and learning. The methodological approach is based on John Dewey’s non-dualistic pragmatism concerning how meaning is constructed and shared between people who participate in a social practice. The research adopts Dewey’s concept of transaction to study children’s meaning-making as reciprocal, coordinated encounters with their environment. The analysis relies on 20 hours of video observations from two preschool departments in Sweden, which concentrated on communicative interactions between children and preschool teachers in which the participants together focused on a common conversation content and coordinated their verbal actions to develop or deepen the content. The results are interpreted with practical epistemological analysis (PEA), epistemological move analysis (EMA) and Dewey’s concepts of habit and custom. The results show that children’s meaning-making is a multidimensional process in which a child’s individual experiences and knowledge interact with situated scaffolding processes and customs in preschool. Teacher competence is a significant determinant of good conditions for meaning-making communication. When children create meaning in preschool, cognitive linguistic content is in the foreground, often intertwined with socialisation and care. The results suggest that focusing only on the social and cultural environment or on the content offered cannot provide an adequate understanding of children’s learning and meaning-making in preschool; it is also crucial to consider the individual dimension of the child, knowledge of the child’s previous experiences and how these factors interact with the child’s experiences in preschool.

The COVID-19 pandemic has resulted in major restructuring of routines and protocols in universities across the globe. The pandemic has disrupted the long-established routines of academic’s everyday life, shifting from on-site teaching and supervision to remote teaching, thus confining academics to a two-dimensional world where work life happens almost entirely without human contact. To date, little is known in regard to activities that academics do outside the university; activities that focus on rest, renewal and family structures, centring care for the private sphere. In this chapter, we share a collection of autoethnographies that focuses on self-care strategies which we implement to create a sense of wellbeing during this time of world crisis. We transcend culture and context as we offer our narratives to encourage other academics to protect the reflective practice that is essential to personal wellbeing as well as quality research and education. © 2023 selection and editorial matter, Narelle Lemon, Heidi Harju-Luukkainen, and Susanne Garvis; individual chapters, the contributors.