Pre-service teachers’ playfulness and its connections to the working life

Playfulness is a requisite for designing and realizing playful child-centred methods in the early childhood education (ECE) contexts. Playfulness is useful also in interaction with colleagues and caregivers and it has potential to bring hope. It is assumed that ECE teachers naturally bring playfulness into the daily practices. Despite of the vast amount of playfulness studies, ECE teachers nor the ECE teacher education have not gained scientific interest. The aim of this mixed method research is to explore pre-service teachers’ playfulness, particularly in the area of ECE. Following research questions were set: 1) How playful do the pre-service ECE teachers view themselves, and what are the main qualities connected with their playfulness? and 2) How pre-service teachers’ agency relates to the playfulness in the context of working life? Quantitative analysis and qualitative abductive content analysis resulted findings: teacher’s playfulness-connected pedagogical actions are teacher-initiated, child-centered and community-related with shared agency. Pre-service teachers’ cautiousness prevents their playfulness and adaptivity. The results are useful in designing ECE education. In addition, results bring new knowledge about playfulness in the ECE domain. The findings will be discussed from the theoretical perspectives including the relations of agency, cautiousness and playfulness, and practical pedagogical usefulness.