‘Being on the move’: Time-spatial organisation and mobility in a mobile preschool

Children’s education in ‘good’ nature: Perceptions of activities in nature spaces in mobile preschools

“…Common routines are to leave the preschool yard at 9:00 a.m. and return at 3:00 p.m. The preferred locations are outdoor places; forests and wooded recreational areas in particular are highlighted as the ideal environments for children's play and learning (Ekman Ladru and Gustafson, 2018;Gustafson et al, 2017;Gustafson and van der Burgt, 2015). The opportunities that the mobile preschools are assumed to offer are mainly connected to two different ideas -complementary and compensatory.…”

Children’s socialization into the mobile preschool: a priming event collectively performed by novice children, ‘old-timers’, and pedagogues

“…Additionally, the bus journeys involve recurrent spatial transitions: getting on and off the bus, walking to the location of the morning activities, returning to the bus for lunch, walking to the location of the afternoon activities, and returning to the bus again. The novice mobile preschool children must learn these daily mobility practices, often conducted by walking in line with one pedagogue in front and another at the end to maintain control of the group (Gustafson and van der Burgt 2015;Ekman Ladru and Gustafson 2018;Ekman Ladru and Gustafson 2020). The pedagogues used diverse strategies in cooperation with the more experienced old-timers (Lave and Wenger 1991) to show the novice children how to perform walking in line.…”

“…It is therefore essential to look more deeply into children's transitions and socialization during ECEC. This especially applies to children starting their education in mobile preschool practice for whom these changes involve more than just moving from one division to another in the same building, encountering new pedagogues and material, as is usual when preschool children move up to the next age group; rather, these new 'mobile preschool children' move to a division with a very specific time-spatial organization and on a daily basis travel by bus to various locations, encountering diverse environments, materials, and people (Gustafson and van der Burgt 2015;Ekman Ladru and Gustafson 2018). Wilder and Lillvist (2018) emphasized the need for collaboration between parents, teachers, and ECEC workers in order to understand children's learning trajectories and to create transitions including both continuity and change for the child (see Docket and Einarsdottir 2017 for discussion of the need to recognize discontinuity as an important dimension of children's learning and development).…”

Spaces of early childhood: Spatial approaches in research on early childhood education and care

“…Given these developments, and more that we have no space to outline here 2 , that inform and challenge our notion of early childhood spaces, there is a small but growing body of ECEC-related research which already demonstrates the wide ranging and productive insights new perspectives on space can offer: such as political strategies that produce certain and constructed scales of ECEC-governance (e.g., Mahon, 2006), related 'governable spaces of ECEC' (e.g., Gallagher, 2012), the production of a 'global educational 1 1 space' (e.g., Millei & Jones, 2014); educative spaces within ECEC services (e.g., Kjorholt & Seland, 2013) and children's spatial strategies to take control and act autonomously within them (e.g., Gallacher, 2005). Although these studies rely on the same basic assumptions about space, they use quite diverse theoretical approaches, such as post-structural theories on space informed by Deleuze & Guattari (e.g., Sumsion, Stratigos & Bradley, 2014) as well as practice-analytical ones referring to Lefebvre (e.g., Rutanen, 2012), de Certeau (e.g., Schnoor, 2015) or Massey (e.g., Bollig, 2015), or perspectives based on post-colonial (e.g., Nxumalo & Cedillo, 2017) and citizenship theories (e.g., Gustafson & van der Burgt, 2015).…”