This study examines the two kindergarten teachers’ shared professional identities in teamwork in an effort to clarify what constitutes their shared identities and how these identities affect the teachers’ professional practices and beliefs. The relational nature of identity maintains that individuals are not the only constructors of their identity, and the literature on teacher education emphasizes the importance of identity in teacher development. The in-depth analysis of the two kindergarten teachers’ narrative interviews revealed how the educators constructed their professional identities by intertwining the features of their context, feedback, and teaching. The findings indicate that the shared professional identities of the two early childhood teachers are developed and negotiated through four shared features: commitment, feedback, educational tasks, and professional agency. Together these four shared features shape the teachers’ professional roles and pedagogical practices—either by giving support to professional growth and empowerment or by having a decreasing effect on the teachers’ professional identity and agency in early childhood contexts.

Purpose: The new Finnish National Core Curriculum for Early Childhood Education and Care (2018) strongly highlights pedagogical knowledge and practice, demanding teachers to develop their pedagogical thinking, evaluation, judgment, and operating culture. Since ethics is viewed as vital characteristics of the teaching profession, our objective is to make these complex ethical issues more visible to be subject to democratic discussion and change. Design/Approach/Methods: The framework comprises a broad theory base of codes of ethics and professional codes of ethics of teaching. The research materials were national curricula of early childhood education and care (ECEC)- and pre-primary education. The eight-step qualitative analysis process was applied to identify and shed light on the codes of ethics laying the foundations for purposeful and ethical early childhood education (ECE) teacher. Findings: The results indicate that through both theoretical lenses, the Finnish ECEC curricula comprise several ethical codes. For the future purposeful ECE teachers as ethical professionals, the results raise questions for further discussion. Particularly, issues related to the ethics of care, intellectual freedom, inquiry stance, and professional competence, and diversity may further enhance our ECEC curricula. Originality/Value: During recent decades, the ethics concerning ECEC have gained increasing global attention. Particularly, there is a large international consensus considering ECEC as a prominent policy equalizing opportunities.

Play and playfulness are understood as basic and vital elements of early childhood education (ECE), and together with playful pedagogies, they perform a central role in Finnish ECE. In multidisciplinary research, children’s learning is generally understood through the inquiring process of play. However, playfulness, as opposed to play, has received relatively little scholarly attention, and educators’ use of playfulness has received even less. Playfulness is a vital part of life for both adults and children. At the same time, teachers’ behavior can influence the playfulness of a child; moreover, teachers’ own playfulness is critical for establishing warm and secure relationships with children. As such, the aim of this research was to explore pre-service teachers’ (PsTs’) understanding of agentic playfulness, particularly in the ECE context. Study participants included 159 PsTs; study data were gathered from PsTs’ written reflections regarding the use of playfulness in their future work. The results of qualitative analyses showed that the PsTs’ agentic playfulness mirrored a relational and tensious space consisting of three domains: teacher-initiated agentic playfulness, child-centered agentic playfulness, and community-shared agentic playfulness. Each domain revealed dimensions of the nature of PsTs’ orientation of their agentic playfulness. The results are discussed in relation to pedagogization of play, relational pedagogy community of learners, and teacher education supporting and developing future ECE teachers’ agentic playfulness.

Actions to mitigate the spread of the COVID-19 pandemic, such as emergency remote teaching (ERT), affected the lives of school children, their parents, and schooling in spring 2020. Rapid changes in routines due to lockdown and ERT were challenging, especially for many children with special needs (SEN). This article focuses on parents’ perspectives regarding their basic psychological needs, i.e. competence, autonomy, and relatedness, in relation to the schooling of their children with SEN. Questionnaire data consisted of the views of 120 parents who described 179 resources and 151 challenges concerning their basic psychological needs during ERT of their children. Data were analysed following the principles of theoretical categorising. According to the results, parents experienced their pedagogical as well as intra- and interpersonal competence as resources to support the child in ERT. The greatest challenges concerned relatedness between parents and children as well as between parents, school, and other professionals. The study suggests schools and teachers to develop instructions to support teacher–parent interaction and learning of all children to cope with ongoing and future remote and face-to-face teaching for children with SEN.

Drawing on the sociocultural view, shared knowledge is regarded as a basis for interdependent working and multi-professional learning in early childhood education. Shared professional knowledge can be seen as a central element in successful collaboration facilitating individual and collaborative professional learning. This study aims to investigate the content and implementation of shared professional knowledge in an early childhood context. Video-taped data were collected using a stimulated recall method from the two participating teachers. The results show that the content of shared professional knowledge was related to two areas in the teachers’ professional knowledge: professional self and professional tasks. In addition, the shared professional knowledge varied according to the teachers’ work contexts. This study offers new knowledge on early childhood education practices and teacher education, considering multi-professional collaboration, and shared learning.

The growing expectations and demands for teacher education highlight the need to provide future teachers with more knowledge and to prepare teachers as expert collaborators who can learn from each other. This qualitative case study based on video-recorded reflective assignments investigated how Finnish pre-service special education teachers’ experiences in relational interprofessional work within institutional boundary spaces – the so-called knotworking – contributed to the evolution of their professional agency. The results indicate that interprofessional collaboration during teacher education was challenging and orienting themselves as students was the principal way teachers negotiate their role within boundaries.