Abstract
Morality is part of children’s lives from the time of their first relationships. Children have access to the cultural values and belief system as soon as they start to communicate and can make inferences about their social interaction. This makes preschool an influential meeting place for children’s moral development. In preschool, children experience and express moral values, and early childhood moral education is a matter of helping children show consideration for the self and for others. In this chapter, issues of importance for children’s moral learning in preschool will be discussed. The relational character of morality, interdependence and the concrete encounters between children and teachers constitute an important basis of insights into moral values. Teachers’ didactics, the behaviour of teachers and their construal of the situation must be included in the moral construction that children are attempting. This raises questions such as: What aspects are essential in children’s moral discoveries and how can teachers encourage children’s moral learning?
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Notes
- 1.
The use of moral contracts in my research has been inspired by the idea of meta-contracts as a basis for human interaction. The philosopher and sociologist Schütz (1972) originally developed this theory. Schütz also uses the concept ‘stock of knowledge’ to describe this phenomenon. Interested readers can read about this theory in the book: The Phenomenology of the social world. The concept of meta-contract has been taken further by Hundeide (1985, 2006) in his extensive research on children’s life-worlds. See, for example, the book Sociokulturella ramar för barns utveckling. Barns livsvärldar [Sociocultural frames for children’s development: Children’s life-worlds]. For a more developed discussion on moral contracts and meta-contracts related to my research, see, for example, Johansson (2007a) Etiska överenskommelser i förskolebarns världar [Moral agreements in preschool children’s worlds].
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Johansson, E. (2011). Moral Discoveries and Learning in Preschool. In: Pramling, N., Pramling Samuelsson, I. (eds) Educational Encounters: Nordic Studies in Early Childhood Didactics. International perspectives on early childhood education and development, vol 4. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-007-1617-9_7
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