Expertise of Early Childhood Educators

Abstract

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.