Myth and Antinomy in Early Childhood Education: Formal vs. Applied Curricula and Professional Development

Kindergarten is considered as the first significant educational context that children interface. As a result, it is very interesting to understand the type of learning that they interface in such context. The present study attempts to delineate the actual educational practices that teachers apply, as well as the instructional content that children are taught. To this aim, 77 teachers and a total of 187 pre-designed activities were recorded in systematic observation by trained staff, who were familiarized prior to the research with the observational scale. The analysis of the data uncovered several specific codes, namely, the selected themes that teachers developed, time sequence and repeatability, theme selection criteria, content of educational activities (concerning the learning areas, the exact activities that occurred, the educational material teachers used, and the space of classroom that activities were conducted), and teaching methods. The results indicated that there are considerable similarities among the practices that teachers apply, regardless of the theme or the class of children. More specifically, teachers tended to develop repeatedly specific themes every year without any significant adjustments. Moreover, they emphasized on language education, as they included it in each and every theme they taught, while mathematics and other learning areas (e.g., new technologies, physical education, etc.) were surprisingly contemned. Kindergarten teachers seem to preserve a model of practice that is repeated in every theme development. Such a model includes lecturing the whole class and individual consolidation activities. The model of teaching that emerged from our analysis illustrated that the teacher-centered approach prevails, while teachers' practice is defined by old-fashioned ways. As a consequence, our results show that further investigation should be conducted in order to earn deeper insight on the reasons that lead teachers to conserve this kind of teaching practices and select the instructional content.