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This week, universities all over Finland are welcoming their new students to campus and both research and teaching is gearing up again after the summer break. Corona is the talk of the town, since things are not even next to normal yet. A variety of restrictions are adopted to minimize the risks of people getting infected. Currently, only first year students are allowed at campus, me and many of my collegues are distance working, and a majority of our research and teaching activities are realized with the help of digital tools.

Naturally, the corona issue must be addressed as a content in ECEC teacher education. It is a matter that affects young children´s lives in just so many ways right now. Students and teachers in ECEC need to embrace resources that allows them to handle the situation in the best ways possible. Most children are back in their settings, but there are tight restrictions to follow in order to prevent the virus from spreading out of control. It is a tough guess that the day-to-day life in ECEC settings is adapted in profound ways and that staff sometimes are left wondering about what the best practices might be. The same goes for student teachers doing their teaching practice right now.

Thus, I want to share with you an article that was published (in Swedish) by our research group in the beginning of July in the Nordic scientific journal BARN. The article focuses on children´s participation during the initial phase of the corona virus outbreak in Finland and Sweden (in late March 2020) and it sheds light on how children express their thoughts and feelings about the situation. The study shows that at the time, children´s participation was expressed regarding four prominent themes: 1) health realted issues, 2) existential worries and care, 3) social limitations and changed routines, and 4) play, humor, and creativity as a means to handle the situation. The article also addresses some of the implications for staff i.e. what approaches they could adopt in order to support children´s participation and thus strengthen their ability to deal with the effects of the corona crisis.

The article might give practitioners a deeper understanding of the importance of providing rich affordances for creative play and open dialogue, which gives children the opportunity to express themselves and to address the challenges that the corona crisis faces them with. These are among the best ways to support their resilience and strengthen their capacities to deal with life and it´s sometimes unpredictable challenges. As the article is among the first research published with a focus on children´s ways of perceiving and managing corona, I look forward to more studies on this topic shortly.

PS. The study has so far been published only in Swedish, but I will provide the English abstract below. Publication of the results in English is in progress, so I´ll let you know as soon as they are out.

English abstract

The corona pandemic is a new social crisis that is sparsely researched, and different perspectives on the corona virus are needed. This article helps to deepen the knowledge of children’s expres-sion of the corona virus. It highlights staff’s descriptions of children’s expressions regarding the coronavirus outbreak in Finland and Sweden in early childhood education contexts in March 2020. The empirical material consists of 79 questionnaires from early childhood education staff. The concepts participation and resilience have been used as theoretical background and these are discussed in the article. The analysis highlights four different forms of participation in relation to the outbreak of the virus. The article contributes to putting children’s participation in relation to a social crisis like the corona pandemic and shows a multifaceted participation. This can have implications both on attitudes and working methods in relation to crises.