Introducing nature of science in early childhood education: results from a project in collaboration with teachers

We report from a project performed in collaboration between researchers and early childhood education (ECE) teachers. The idea of the project was to introduce ‘nature of science’ (NOS) in the ECE setting through using book-talks connected to trade books (narratives as well as expository books). Much research on NOS teaching has been done, but very scarcely targeting the youngest children. The empirical data in this project consists of audio recordings of book-talks (N=152) with children aged 2-6 led by five teachers, audio recordings of focus groups and workshops (N=9) with the teachers, documentation of children’s drawings as well as of artefacts used by the preschool teachers. The results show that discussions about a variety of NOS issues are possible in an ECE context. It also shows that attention can be directed towards NOS during book talks regardless of genre or if the books contain explicit NOS references or not. However, book-talks connected to books without explicit NOS references require that the teacher finds other ways to direct attention towards NOS.  The teachers involved in this project managed to do this with only a short introduction to NOS. This shows that book-talks has great potential as an approach to introducing NOS to the youngest children. The results further showed that the teachers experienced that the NOS book-talks had spin off-effects such as increased curiosity, new questions, and engagement in investigations among the children. These results point to the potential for NOS teaching to contribute to empowerment and agency for the children, and positions NOS as an important part of science in ECE that values democracy and social justice as central. Building on the results, we present a didactical model that can support teachers when introducing NOS to young children.