Research on educational activities generally focuses on the importance of positive emotions in the interaction between teachers and children. This article will focus on the challenging emotions that can arise when kindergarten staff interact with the children. The empirical material has been collected from a qualitative study of conflicts between…

From children's own perspective, play and learning are not always separate in practices during early years. The purpose of this article is, first, to scrutinise the background and character of early years education in terms of play and learning. Second, to elaborate the findings of several years of research about children's learning in preschool…

Children today live in different cultural settings. The pre-school culture is one of them and the media culture outside the pre-school another. These cultures are in different ways characterised by opposite and often even conflicting traditions. This article shows how educators and children handle this dilemma by using interaction as a tool to…