Preschool Children’s Collaborative Science Learning Scaffolded by Tablets – a Teacher’s View

The potential of tablets to support collaborative inquiry-based science learning and reflective thinking in preschool has previously been investigated by us through the analysis of teacher-led activities. These included the children making timelapse photography and Slowmation movies and we reported an enhanced and focused reasoning about water phase changes in situations where timelapse movies were used for stimulated recall. Furthermore, we showed that children communicated in a more advanced manner about the phenomenon and they focused more readily on problem solving when active in experimentation or Slowmation producing contexts. In this paper, we shift focus to the participating teacher and his perspective on science and the work with timelapse and Slowmation in the preschool context. With a theoretical framework of developmental pedagogy and phenomenography, the preschool teacher’s talk about the learning object (science or tablet), and about the act of learning was analysed from three perspectives: the relation between teacher-science/tablet, the teacher-children, and the children-science/tablet. Further, possibilities and challenges expressed by the preschool teacher in relation to the three perspectives were identified and interestingly, our preliminary data shows that most possibilities are described in the relation between the children and science. To the contrary, most challenges described are found between the teacher and the science learning object, in terms of lack of knowledge. This finding is consistent with our own experience of preschool teachers’ insecurity in science and points to the need of further discussing teacher’s experiences of science and science education alongside their experience of children, children’s learning and the role they perceive for themselves during science learning activities.