Semiotic working process as a basis for children's craft process – An experiment in Finnish pre-school group

: An experiment in Finnish pre-school group

: Marja-Leena Rönkkö, Juli-Anna Aerila

: Ulla Härkönen

Publisher: University of Eastern Finland

: Joensuu

: 2013

: Reorientation of teacher education towards sustainability trough theory and practice. Proceedings of the 10th international JTEFS/BBCC conference Sustainable development. Culture. Education.

: 23

: Publications of the University of Eastern Finland : reports and studies in education, humanities, and theology

: 291

: 306

: 16

: 978-952-61-1112-4

: 1798-565X

: 1798-5641

: http://epublications.uef.fi/pub/urn_isbn_978-952-61-1112-4/urn_isbn_978-952-61-1112-4.pdf

In Finland, basic education embraces a number of cross-curricular themes, including
sustainable development. These cross-curricular themes cannot be confused with discrete school subjects, but are to be taught via the principle of integration through the contents of established class-subjects. Pre-school education in Finland establishes sustainable development as the centre of a ’key content’ area. However, while teachers value cross-curricular themes, such as sustainable development, many find teaching them to be challenging. Appropriate learning materials and methods for teaching cross-curricular themes are lacking. This article describes an experiment in which a literature-based semiotic working process and the craft process are combined. The semiotic working process is a literature-based teaching method that has been developed especially for education and reading fictional literature. The craft process contains in itself many themes and covers the basic skills of sustainable development. Our research material consists of anticipatory stories collected through storycrafting. Anticipatory story method means predicting the continuity of a fragment of a story. The storycrafting method is implemented in this study as an anticipatory story based on a fragment of a fictional text. Another part of the data is character descriptions and the characters themselves made by children using craft materials and techniques. The character is made using the concept of a holistic craft where the maker designs, produces and evaluates the whole process. The semiotic working process and the craft process have not been previously connected, but it seems that they suit each other well and that the consistency and quality of teaching increases through this merger.