A Study on Early Childhood Teachers9 experiences to Guarantee Children9s Right to Participate in the Early childhood․Play-centered curriculum

This study aims to suggest ways to realize children's participation rights by exploring teachers' experiences to ensure children's participation rights in the process of implementing early childhood and play-based education. To this end, this study conducts individual in-depth interviews with six teachers in charge of kindergartens and nurseries, and a spiral analysis was conducted. The results showed that teachers' experiences of ensuring children's participation can be categorized into efforts to ensure children's participation and difficulties in the implementation process. First, teachers saw the importance of ensuring children's right to participate and made efforts to engage children by asking questions in their daily routines, supporting interactions that included all children, ensuring children's initiative in play, and accommodating children's needs for play. Second, teachers were challenged by high toddler-to-teacher ratios, lack of knowledge and experience in how to support children, dichotomous perceptions of play and learning, and disagreements with institutional administrators. The findings of this study will provide implications for practical measures to realize children9s right to participate.