Every preschool age child in Finland has the right to day care and the expertise of educators is multidimensional. The aim of this article is to clarify the expertise of those early childhood educators, who have the competence of kindergarten teachers (n = 80). The data consisted of the early educators' stories of their growth towards expertise. The analysis was carried out by the methods of content analysis. As the results, three key competences of the informants were created: 1) contextual knowledge, 2) cooperation and communication knowledge, and 3) pedagogical knowledge. This research shows that the educators' work has become more and more collegial and it is necessary to expand a notion of individual expertise into the realm of collaborative and socially shared expertise.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.