| dc.description.abstract | The purpose of the present study is to explore the enactment of child-centered curriculum in a private kindergarten in Taiwan and to understand how it occurs as a network effect. The issue of child-centeredness has been the key point of early childhood education research so far, and the mainstream literature have used it as a principle or criterion to assess the effectiveness of the kindergarten curriculum ,and to evaluate whether the kindergarten program has achieved the educational aspiration of targeting children′s interests and active learning. Rather than assessing whether the special case meet the criteria, this doctoral thesis argues that it is necessary to reveal the specific processes of child-centered curriculum in the kindergarten everyday work.
This study draws on the research framework of actor-network theory, which has the theoretical advantage of capturing the ways in which mundane materials are linked to children or teachers in order to develop a socio-material understanding of child-centered curriculum. Thus, the theoretical research framework helps to pay attention to how the child-centered curriculum enacted by the field case ,and further unfolds that what has happened, especially not only focusing on human entities such as children and teachers that we considered important, but also focusing on these material entities that are also crucial and cannot be excluded when we understand the kindergarten curriculum.
Through the analysis of field data such as participant observations, interviews, and documents, the following studies were revealed: Firstly, in order to promote the ＂child-centered＂ curriculum practice, the kindergarten in this case connected some key actors, such as young children′s ＂ academic achievement ＂ , parents and self-designed teaching materials.. Secondly, the curriculum materials for specific activities, such as saws, wooden strips and the ＂sizzling＂ sounds they make when young children cutting, or white paper and floors, or experience charts with whiteboards or windows, these material actors connect with young children and emerge the child-centered curriculum effect of young children′s interaction. Third, there are also some activities that do not show the above-mentioned curriculum effects, but promote the curriculum effect of teacher-child interaction and learning.
Therefore, the research contribution of this doctoral dissertation is to re-understand the child-centered curriculum not from the perspective of cognitive constructivism or social constructivist theory, but also from the perspective of socio-material to reveal the child-centered curriculum enactment promoted by some less conspicuous materials.
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