Perspectives on the Finnish Early Years STEAM Education : Reflecting on the Avant-Garde

Abstract

Skills needed to live in our current societies are rapidly changing. How will we provide children with the skills they will need in the future? While early years education has been traditionally strong in supporting 21st century skills like creativity, collaboration and problem-solving within play, new demands such as fostering digital skills and computational thinking challenge current practices and methods and call us as researchers and educators to urgently rethink and re-design how such skills could be advanced in early childhood education. Over the recent years, the Finnish educational system has enjoyed intense national and international attention, and the Early Childhood Education and Care sector along with it. This has resulted in multiple descriptions and attempts to characterize its main differences from other national systems. The Finnish early years education has been heralded, for example, for its holistic orientation to children’s care, and education as well as its focus on playful learning approaches and participatory culture. However, despite these positive characterizations and the arguably great potential of the Finnish pre-primary education for offering children with rich opportunities to engage in STEAM (Science, Technology, Engineering, Arts and Mathematics) learning, early childhood educators are still cautious to implement STEAM and phenomenon-based learning. In this chapter, we will present three distinctive approaches to early STEAM education developed in Finland, namely 1) phenomenon-based learning, 2) children’s maker-spaces and 3) children’s projects. In addition, we will also discuss and draw out suggestions on how these approaches could potentially address the above concerns regarding Finnish early years STEAM education.

The skills needed to live in our current societies are rapidly changing. How will we provide children with the skills they will need in the future? While early years education has been traditionally strong in supporting 21st century skills like creativity, collaboration and problem-solving within play, global crises around the ecological, social and economic sustainability of our societies challenge current practices and call on us as researchers and educators to rethink how these and other skills, like computational thinking, could be advanced in early childhood education via science, technology, engineering, arts and mathematics (STEAM) education. Over recent years, the Finnish educational system has enjoyed intense national and international attention, the early childhood education and care (ECEC) sector along with it. This has resulted in multiple descriptions and attempts to characterize Finnish education’s main differences from other national systems. Finnish early years education has been heralded for its holistic orientation to children’s care and education, as well as its focus on playful learning approaches and participatory culture. However, despite these positive characterizations and the arguably great potential of the Finnish pre-primary education for offering children with rich opportunities to engage in STEAM learning, early childhood educators are still cautious in implementing STEAM and phenomenon-based learning. In this chapter, we will present three distinctive approaches to early STEAM education developed in Finland, namely 1) phenomenon-based learning, 2) children’s maker-spaces and 3) children’s projects. In addition, we will also discuss how these approaches build on the current form of Finnish ECEC and draw out suggestions on how these approaches could potentially address the above concerns regarding Finnish early years STEAM education.