Polska
Brief description of the project (general purpose/objectives, number and dates of the meetings, timeline, proposed activities, starting points for discussion selected in each of the meetings, etc.)
The observations were conducted in one preschool setting (Bemontessori), in two mixed-age groups: Lawendowa and Miętowa. The groups included children aged approximately 3–7 years and each group participated in 10 sessions, resulting in 10 observations per group (20 observations in total).
The observations were carried out between 16.01.2026 and 20.03.2026 in Lawendowa and 28.01.2026 and 20.02.2026 in Miętowa. Sessions usually lasted approximately 45–60 minutes, with the shortest activities lasting around 30 minutes and the longest extending to approximately 90 minutes, depending on the character of the activity and children’s engagement.
Each group consisted on average 16 children in Miętowa group and 17 children in Lawendowa, with participation varying slightly across sessions. As mixed-age groups, both settings created opportunities for different levels of participation, peer support and varied forms of engagement.
Meetings often began with a shared provocation or circle discussion, frequently emerging from a question, a natural object, an observation brought by children, a story, image or digital prompt. These openings often served as starting points for collaborative inquiry and philosophical dialogue.
Activities across the observation cycle combined indoor and outdoor exploration and often included nature observation, documentation through photography, sensory and sound explorations, discussions around environmental interconnections, work with maps and Google Earth, creative representation through drawing, and collaborative media-making activities such as creating advertisements. Several meetings also revisited documentation from previous sessions, allowing children to return to earlier observations and extend shared reflection.
Across the timeline of observations, activities often moved between direct exploration, dialogue, documentation and collective meaning-making, with recurring attention to perspective-taking, relationships in nature and the use of digital technologies as tools supporting inquiry.
How have the children participated? How (if) has their participation changed throughout the sessions?
Group: Lawendowa
Session: Web of Life
Children’s participation across the observed sessions in both groups (Lawendowa and Miętowa) reveals a complex, multi-layered pattern of engagement that cannot be reduced to simple categories of active versus passive involvement. Instead, participation emerges as a dynamic spectrum shaped by interactional structures, task design, and the social composition of the group, encompassing verbal contributions, embodied action, affective expression, and forms of peripheral presence.
A dominant and highly visible form of participation is children’s spontaneous verbal engagement, often unfolding in rapid, overlapping sequences. Children eagerly contribute associations, examples, and fragments of knowledge, frequently building on familiar experiences. For instance, when discussing nature, one child elaborates: “nature is summer, sunbathing on the beach, autumn is falling leaves, and winter is sledding”, while others add concrete elements such as “apples” or refer to seasonal phenomena like migrating cranes. These contributions demonstrate a readiness to enter the shared discourse and an ability to connect abstract prompts to lived experience. In several moments, children attempt causal explanations, as in the discussion of bees: “because they pollinate flowers and thanks to that we have strawberries… if there were fewer of them, we would have less oxygen”. Although scientifically imprecise, such statements indicate emerging explanatory thinking and an orientation toward linking processes within a system.
However, this verbal participation is often cumulative but weakly integrated. Children speak in quick succession, frequently overlapping, with limited uptake or sustained elaboration of previous contributions. This results in a form of collective discourse that is rich in input but relatively shallow in terms of dialogic development. A particularly telling pattern appears in moments of disagreement, where participation shifts from idea-building to position-taking, as children repeat: “I don’t think so” / “I do think so”. These exchanges are affectively charged and socially engaging, yet they rarely develop into reasoned argumentation or negotiated understanding, indicating that while the social dimension of participation is strong, its epistemic dimension remains emergent.
Alongside these more visible forms, there are also important instances of peripheral or low-visibility participation. Some children remain silent, observe without speaking, or engage only when directly prompted. In one case, a child explicitly refuses to take part in a group task and remains outside the activity until its conclusion. Such forms of participation highlight the asymmetrical distribution of engagement within the group and suggest that participation cannot be equated solely with verbal contribution. Instead, it includes a range of positions, from active contributors to observers and resistors, each of which shapes the collective process in different ways.
A particularly significant dimension of participation emerges in embodied and material engagement, especially during outdoor activities. When children are invited to construct a shared structure, they immediately engage physically—collecting materials, manipulating objects, and moving through space. This mode of participation is often more inclusive, drawing in children who are less verbally active. At the same time, it reveals a critical tension: although the task is framed as collaborative, children frequently work in parallel after an initial shared decision, as reflected in the observation that “everyone worked individually, but based on a common agreement”. This suggests that participation is collective at the level of intention but not fully integrated at the level of action.
Participation also takes the form of negotiation and collective decision-making, particularly in situations where the group must agree on a shared outcome. During the construction task, children propose competing ideas — “let’s make a pyramid”, “let’s make a snowman”— and attempt to reach consensus through discussion and voting. These interactions demonstrate emerging capacities for perspective-taking and compromise, as well as the social complexity of group work. However, they also expose the limits of such processes: negotiations can be prolonged and exhausting, and not all children accept the final decision, leading in some cases to withdrawal from participation altogether.
In sessions involving tools such as cameras or drawings, participation becomes mediated through artifacts, introducing a semiotic dimension. Children engage in taking photographs, discussing images, and using newly introduced vocabulary such as “sharp”, “blurred”, or “in the centre”. These moments indicate the development of shared language and representational awareness. At the same time, many children struggle to articulate their intentions, offering minimal explanations such as “I don’t know” or “I just chose it”. This suggests that while participation is present at the level of action, reflective engagement remains uneven.
Importantly, there are also instances of peer-supported participation, particularly in small-group contexts. Older or more experienced children assist others by giving instructions such as “click on these arrows” or “you need to zoom in”. These interactions point to the emergence of horizontal learning processes and distributed expertise within the group. However, such moments tend to be brief and are not consistently developed into sustained collaborative inquiry.
Finally, participation is shaped by a constant tension between engagement and disruption. Many sessions are characterized by high levels of noise, joking, and off-task behavior, with children talking simultaneously or losing focus. While this can fragment the flow of interaction and limit the depth of discussion, it also reflects a strong social energy and willingness to engage, albeit not always in ways aligned with the intended learning process.
Taken together, these observations suggest that children’s participation is abundant, diverse, and socially vibrant, yet only intermittently oriented toward sustained collaborative knowledge building. We see early forms of shared meaning-making and collective engagement, but these are often fragmented, parallel, or affect-driven rather than cumulatively developed. In this sense, the observed participation reflects an emergent stage of Knowledge Building, where ideas are generated and shared but not yet systematically improved. At the same time, the strong role of interaction aligns with Lev Vygotsky’s emphasis on the social nature of learning, while moments of individual assertion and conceptual inconsistency echo processes described by Jean Piaget. The integration of action, tools, and experience further resonates with Seymour Papert, although the transition from activity to reflective knowledge construction remains partial.
Across the observed sessions in the Lawendowa and Miętowa groups, children’s participation demonstrates a gradual, though uneven shift from immediate, experience-based responses toward more structured, reflective, and relational forms of engagement. This change is neither linear nor uniform across all children; rather, it unfolds through moments of progression, stabilization, and occasional regression, depending on the nature of the activity and the degree of facilitation.
In the initial sessions, participation is predominantly associative and experience-driven, with children responding quickly to prompts by naming familiar elements or offering intuitive judgments. For example, when asked about nature, children contribute spontaneously: “nature is summer… autumn… winter”, “apples”, “cranes fly to warm countries”. These early contributions are rich in content but largely individual and non-cumulative, with limited reference to others’ ideas. Participation at this stage is characterized by immediacy and enthusiasm, but also by fragmentation and overlapping speech.
As sessions progress, particularly in activities involving ecological relationships (e.g., pollination or the “network of life”), there is a noticeable shift toward more relational and causal forms of participation. Children begin to articulate connections between elements, as seen in statements such as: “bees pollinate flowers and thanks to that we have strawberries” or “if there were fewer bees, we would have less oxygen”. Although these explanations remain partially inaccurate, they indicate an important development: children are no longer only naming elements but attempting to link them within a system. This marks a transition toward early forms of shared conceptual space, even if still loosely structured.
A further development becomes visible in moments of collective negotiation and decision-making, particularly during group construction tasks. In these situations, participation shifts from individual expression to interactional coordination, as children propose ideas, respond to others, and attempt to reach agreement. For example, when deciding what to build, children suggest alternatives — “let’s make a pyramid”, “let’s make a snowman”—and eventually move toward compromise: “the head of a snowman and the rest a pyramid”. This indicates an increasing capacity to engage with others’ perspectives, even if the process remains effortful and not always successful.
At the same time, the data reveal that this shift toward more collaborative participation is fragile and context-dependent. In many instances, children revert to parallel action after initial agreement, as reflected in the observation that “everyone worked individually, but based on a common agreement”. This suggests that while children begin to participate in shared planning, they do not consistently sustain joint action or co-elaboration, highlighting the partial nature of this developmental shift.
In sessions involving tools such as cameras and photographs, participation evolves further toward reflective and semiotic engagement. Children begin to use more specialized vocabulary — “sharp”, “blurred”, “in the centre”— and to evaluate visual representations. These moments indicate a growing awareness of criteria and perspective, which are essential components of both critical and metacognitive thinking. However, this development is uneven: while some children attempt to justify their choices, others remain at the level of intuitive selection, responding with statements such as “I don’t know” or “I just chose it”.
An important dimension of change concerns the role of peer interaction. In later sessions, there are more frequent instances of children supporting one another, particularly in small-group contexts. For example, children give instructions to peers — “click on these arrows”, “you need to zoom in”— indicating the emergence of distributed expertise within the group. Although these interactions remain brief, they suggest a shift from teacher-centred to more peer-mediated participation, which is a key condition for collaborative knowledge building.
However, this progression is accompanied by persistent challenges, particularly related to group dynamics and attention management.
Across sessions, noise, overlapping speech, and off-task behaviour continue to disrupt the flow of interaction. In some cases, this leads to a reduction in the depth of discussion, as children struggle to maintain focus or follow extended lines of reasoning. Thus, while participation becomes more complex in form, it does not consistently become more sustained or integrated.
Another noteworthy shift concerns the emergence of metacognitive awareness, albeit in early and fragmentary forms. Children begin to reflect not only on content but also on the process of working together. A particularly illustrative example is the statement: “it’s hard because when you work in a group you have to make decisions together”. This indicates that children are starting to conceptualize collaboration itself as an object of reflection, which represents a significant step beyond immediate participation.
Taken together, these observations suggest that children’s participation evolves from:
However, this evolution remains incomplete and unstable, with frequent returns to earlier patterns of fragmented or parallel participation.
From a theoretical perspective, this trajectory reflects an early stage of development within Knowledge Building, where children begin to engage with shared ideas but do not yet systematically improve or build upon them. The increasing importance of interaction and peer mediation aligns with Lev Vygotsky’s emphasis on socially situated learning, while the gradual emergence of relational reasoning reflects processes described by Jean Piaget as movement toward more complex cognitive structures.
In sum, children’s participation changes over time through a gradual enrichment of forms and functions, moving toward collaboration and reflection, yet remaining constrained by structural and developmental factors that limit the consolidation of these processes.
What was the role and the activities of the adult/guide/facilitator?
Group: Miętowa;
Session: Needs, Wants, and Advertisement
Across the observed sessions, the adult (facilitator) assumes a highly active, structuring, and multi-functional role, combining elements of knowledge transmission, interaction management, task organization, and occasional facilitation of children’s contributions. However, the balance between these roles shifts depending on the phase of the activity, with a general tendency toward strong pedagogical guidance rather than open-ended facilitation.
A central and recurring dimension of the facilitator’s role is the orchestration of discourse through questioning and reformulation. The adult frequently initiates and maintains interaction by posing questions — often in rapid succession — and by directing attention to specific aspects of the topic. For example, during discussions on nature, the facilitator repeatedly prompts children’s thinking through structured questions such as: “Are bees needed?”, “What does it mean to pollinate?”, or “What happens if there is no water?” . These questions are sometimes open, but often move toward closed or guiding formats, steering children toward particular answers or conceptual directions.
At the same time, the facilitator consistently engages in paraphrasing and revoicing children’s contributions, translating them into more formal or scientifically aligned language. When a child explains pollination in their own terms, the adult reformulates: “Thank you for explaining that”, and then expands the explanation using more precise terminology. This practice validates children’s input while simultaneously repositioning it within an adult-defined knowledge framework. However, it also means that children’s ideas are often absorbed into the teacher’s narrative rather than developed dialogically among peers.
Another important function of the facilitator is knowledge enrichment through extended explanation. In several moments, the adult introduces new information in a more lecture-like mode, for instance when explaining the ecological role of spiders or the decomposition process involving flies: “They help break down old food and animals. Nutrients go back into the soil.” These explanations expand the conceptual field but tend to temporarily suspend children’s participatory role, shifting them into listeners rather than co-constructors of knowledge.
The facilitator also plays a key role in managing the social dynamics and flow of interaction. Given the high level of noise, overlapping speech, and joking among children, the adult frequently intervenes to restore order and focus. This includes explicit behavioural cues such as “be quiet”, “calm legs”, or reminders to listen when others are speaking. In the Miętowa group, similar interventions appear when the facilitator emphasizes the need to respect the speaker: “I would really like to ask that we do not joke during the circle when we are talking about important things.” These actions indicate that a significant portion of the facilitator’s activity is devoted to maintaining the conditions for participation, rather than participation itself.
Closely related to this is the facilitator’s role in distributing participation opportunities, often by directly inviting specific children to speak. When some children remain silent, the adult attempts to engage them by addressing them individually: “Can you tell us what you see?” or “What connection did you find?”. However, this distribution is not always balanced; in some instances, children who actively seek to contribute are overlooked, while others are repeatedly called upon. In one case, a child tries to join the discussion, but the facilitator does not give them the floor, while in another moment, a joking child is explicitly ignored. This suggests that participation is partially mediated and filtered through the facilitator’s decisions, rather than emerging fully organically.
A particularly revealing aspect of the facilitator’s role appears in moments of conflict or disagreement among children. When children argue — “I think they are needed” / “I don’t think so” — the adult intervenes by summarizing positions rather than encouraging deeper exploration: “One boy thinks yes, another thinks no.” This strategy stabilizes the situation socially but does not extend it epistemically; the disagreement is acknowledged but not used as a resource for further reasoning or collaborative inquiry.
In more structured tasks, especially those involving collective decision-making, the facilitator assumes the role of a moderator and regulator of group processes. During the construction of the shared sculpture, the adult repeatedly emphasizes the collective nature of the task: “Remember, this is teamwork—you are creating one thing together.” When conflicting proposals arise — “Let’s make a pyramid”, “Let’s make a snowman”— the facilitator introduces voting and encourages compromise: “Does everyone agree?”, “Do we have another idea so that he is also satisfied?”. This reflects an explicit effort to scaffold social collaboration, although, as observed, not all children ultimately accept the outcome.
In activities involving tools (e.g., cameras), the facilitator takes on the role of technical instructor and cognitive guide. The adult demonstrates how to frame a photograph, explaining concepts such as focus, perspective, and central composition: “The object has to be in the centre… you can zoom in or move closer.” Children’s actions are closely guided, with the facilitator asking: “What do you want to focus on?” and offering step-by-step support. While this enables skill acquisition, it also positions the adult as the primary source of procedural knowledge, with limited space for experimentation or peer-led discovery.
At the same time, there are moments — particularly in outdoor activities — where the facilitator adopts a more withdrawn and supportive stance. During the building of the sculpture, the adult “does not interfere” directly but instead observes, occasionally suggesting or asking questions about possible arrangements. In these moments, children’s agency becomes more visible, and participation shifts toward more autonomous forms, even if still loosely coordinated.
Overall, the facilitator’s role can be understood as oscillating between instruction, control, and facilitation, with a strong emphasis on structuring both content and interaction. While the adult actively supports children’s engagement, validates their contributions, and creates opportunities for participation, the process is largely guided from above rather than co-constructed from within the group.
From a theoretical perspective, the facilitator’s actions resonate with Jerome Bruner’s concept of scaffolding, particularly in the way the adult structures tasks and supports children’s performance. At the same time, the strong steering of discourse limits the emergence of the kind of collective idea development emphasized in Knowledge Building. While interaction is clearly socially mediated—consistent with Lev Vygotsky—the adult remains the central organizer of meaning, and children’s contributions are more often elicited and reformulated than collaboratively expanded.
If different from the practitioner, what role did the class teacher play?
In the observed sessions, where the facilitator was supported by additional adults (class teachers or assistant teachers), their role can be characterized as primarily regulatory, supportive, and organizational, rather than pedagogically leading. While they did not typically shape the conceptual direction of the activity, their presence significantly influenced the conditions under which participation unfolded, particularly in terms of behaviour management, spatial organization, and the maintenance of group coherence.
A key aspect of the class teachers’ role was ensuring behavioural order and physical positioning, especially during circle time and transitions. They frequently intervened to maintain children’s attention and bodily orientation toward the activity. For instance, when a child moved away from the group, a teacher would guide them back to the circle, reinforcing expectations of participation: the child is “brought back to the circle” rather than left to negotiate their own level of engagement. Similarly, teachers reminded children about posture and appropriate behaviour, subtly regulating the learning environment so that the facilitator could continue the activity.
This regulatory role becomes particularly visible in moments of heightened group energy or distraction. In both groups, children often engaged in parallel conversations, joking, or physical movement, as reflected in utterances such as “Aaaa!”, spontaneous laughter, or unrelated comments like “I saw a squirrel!” or “Is that pee?” during outdoor activities. In such situations, the class teachers intervened quietly but consistently, redirecting attention, calming the group, or supporting individual children who struggled to remain engaged. These interventions were typically non-intrusive and backgrounded, allowing the facilitator to retain the primary communicative space.
Another important dimension of the class teachers’ role was individual support, particularly for children who required additional attention. This includes children who were more physically active, easily distracted, or had specific educational needs. For example, one child was observed sitting on a teacher’s lap during the session, while others received reminders or guidance when they became disruptive. In one instance, a teacher supported a child in completing a task by sending them to check the number of bins in the room, effectively re-engaging them through a concrete action. These strategies indicate a responsive, adaptive form of support, oriented toward keeping children within the learning process, even if not directly contributing to its conceptual content.
Class teachers also played a role in logistical organization and task flow, particularly during transitions between activities. For instance, they coordinated practical actions such as sending children to wash their hands, organizing movement between indoor and outdoor spaces, or managing materials. These actions, while not explicitly pedagogical, were essential for sustaining the rhythm of the session and preventing fragmentation.
In some moments, class teachers contributed indirectly to the circulation of knowledge by amplifying or clarifying children’s contributions. For example, when a child made an observation that might not have been heard by the whole group, it was sometimes repeated or supported by an adult, ensuring its visibility within the collective space. This aligns with the facilitator’s own practice of revoicing, but in the case of class teachers, it remained occasional rather than systematic.
Importantly, the class teachers rarely initiated conceptual dialogue or extended children’s ideas independently. Their role remained secondary to the facilitator, with limited direct involvement in questioning, explanation, or knowledge construction. Even when children produced potentially rich contributions—such as “water still flows even when it’s frozen” or “it’s hard to decide in a group because you have to agree with others” —the follow-up was typically led by the facilitator rather than the class teachers. This suggests a clear division of labour: the facilitator as the epistemic leader, and the class teachers as guardians of the learning environment.
At the same time, the presence of multiple adults created a layered structure of authority and support, which both enabled and constrained participation. On the one hand, it allowed for more individualized attention and smoother management of the group. On the other hand, it reinforced a model in which adults collectively oversee and regulate the process, potentially limiting opportunities for children to self-organize or negotiate participation more autonomously.
From an interpretive perspective, the role of the class teacher can be seen as supporting the conditions for socially mediated learning, in line with Lev Vygotsky, but without actively engaging in the co-construction of meaning. Their work is essential yet largely invisible in the epistemic dimension of the activity. In relation to Knowledge Building, this means that while they help sustain the social infrastructure necessary for collaboration, they do not significantly contribute to the advancement of shared ideas.
In sum, the class teachers functioned as stabilizers of the learning environment, enabling participation through regulation, support, and organization, but remaining on the margins of the knowledge-building process itself.
What fostered the collaborative-participative process? Which were the factors impacting on social, critical thinking and meta-cognitive skills?
The collaborative-participative process observed across the sessions was fostered by a constellation of interacting factors, including the design of tasks, the use of shared artifacts, the structuring role of the facilitator, and the social dynamics within the group. These factors created multiple entry points for participation and supported the emergence—albeit uneven—of social, critical, and metacognitive dimensions of thinking.
One of the most significant enabling factors was the use of shared, experience-based tasks anchored in concrete activity, particularly those that required children to act together in a common space. Activities such as constructing the “pyramid of life” or building a collective outdoor structure created conditions for embodied collaboration, where participation did not depend solely on verbal ability. In these contexts, children naturally oriented toward joint action, as reflected in their spontaneous engagement: “let’s make a pyramid”, “let’s make a snowman”, followed by group-level responses such as “yes!” or “I agree”. These moments illustrate how shared goals can generate a common problem space, within which children negotiate, align, and adjust their contributions.
Importantly, such tasks also supported the development of social understanding, particularly around cooperation, decision-making, and collective responsibility. This becomes explicit in children’s own reflections, for example: “it’s hard, because when you work in a group you have to make decisions together, and there has to be a majority”. This statement reveals not only participation in a collaborative process but also an emerging metacognitive awareness of that process—the child is able to articulate the difference between individual and collective work and to reflect on the constraints it imposes.
A second important factor was the use of material and symbolic mediators, such as strings (to represent connections), drawings, photographs, or natural objects. These artifacts functioned as anchors for shared attention and meaning-making, enabling children to externalize and negotiate their ideas. For example, when children created connections between elements of nature, they did not only name them but also visualized and physically enacted them, which supported statements such as: “we are all connected” or “everything is connected like a spider web”. This kind of representation aligns closely with the principles of Maria Montessori, where learning is grounded in concrete experience and the manipulation of materials, allowing abstract relationships to emerge through action.
These material mediations also contributed to the development of early systems thinking, which is closely related to critical thinking. Children began to articulate causal and relational structures, even if in simplified or partially inaccurate ways. For instance, one child explains: “if there were fewer bees, we would have less oxygen”, while another reflects: “because when bees pollinate, we have strawberries and apples”. Although these statements conflate biological processes, they indicate an effort to connect phenomena and reason about interdependence, which is a foundational element of critical thinking.
Another key factor fostering participation was the facilitator’s consistent effort to include children’s voices and build on their contributions, particularly through revoicing and validation. When children offered ideas, the facilitator often responded with affirmations such as “thank you for explaining that” or “that’s a very important connection”, before extending or clarifying the idea. This created a discursive environment in which children’s contributions were treated as meaningful, encouraging further participation.
However, the most powerful moments for collaborative and critical thinking emerged not from teacher-led explanation, but from peer interaction and dialogic tension. For example, when children disagreed — “I think flies are needed” / “I don’t think so”— or when they proposed competing ideas for the group task, they entered a space of implicit argumentation. Even though these exchanges were not always fully developed, they created opportunities for children to encounter alternative perspectives and to position their own thinking in relation to others. This aligns with Matthew Lipman’s concept of a “community of inquiry,” where thinking develops through dialogue, questioning, and the consideration of different viewpoints.
In addition, the process of collective decision-making, including voting and negotiation, fostered both social and metacognitive skills. Children were required to listen, evaluate options, and accept outcomes that did not always align with their preferences. The facilitator’s insistence on shared decisions — “remember, this is teamwork”— supported the development of an understanding that knowledge and action in a group are co-constructed rather than individually determined.
The use of tools such as cameras introduced another important dimension, supporting reflection on representation and perspective. When children discussed photographs, they began to use criteria such as “sharp”, “blurred”, or “in the centre”, and to evaluate their own and others’ work. In some cases, this led to metacognitive statements about learning processes, for example: “we can remember it later” or “a photo can show something we didn’t see before”. These moments indicate an emerging awareness of how knowledge can be constructed, represented, and revisited.
From a broader pedagogical perspective, the observed processes resonate strongly with John Dewey’s emphasis on learning through experience and inquiry. The activities were grounded in action, observation, and reflection, allowing children to engage with real or simulated problems rather than abstract instruction. At the same time, the Montessori context supported children’s autonomy in interacting with materials and exploring their environment, even if this autonomy was sometimes constrained by the structure of the tasks.
Finally, an important enabling factor was the emotional and social climate of the group, characterized by enthusiasm, humour, and a willingness to engage. Children expressed excitement (“Yes!”, “I want to do it!”), curiosity, and enjoyment, particularly in outdoor and hands-on activities. This affective engagement played a crucial role in sustaining participation and opening space for collaborative interaction, even when cognitive engagement was uneven.
In synthesis, the collaborative-participative process was fostered by a combination of shared tasks, material mediation, dialogic interaction, and supportive facilitation, which together created conditions for the emergence of social, critical, and metacognitive skills. While these processes were often fragmentary and uneven, they reveal the early formation of a learning environment that, in line with Knowledge Building, has the potential to evolve toward more sustained and collective knowledge construction.
What might have hindered the collaborative-participative process?
Despite the presence of multiple enabling conditions, the collaborative-participative process observed across the sessions was also shaped—and at times constrained—by a set of recurring factors that limited the depth, continuity, and inclusiveness of collective knowledge construction. These hindering elements relate primarily to the structure of interaction, the role of the adult, the management of group dynamics, and the nature of tasks and discourse.
One of the most significant constraints was the strongly teacher-directed structure of interaction, which, while supporting engagement, often limited opportunities for children to genuinely co-construct ideas. The facilitator frequently controlled the flow of discourse through rapid questioning, topic shifts, and evaluative reformulations. As a result, children’s contributions—although numerous—were rarely taken up and developed by peers. For example, when a child introduced an idea about ecological interdependence, it was often followed not by peer elaboration but by a teacher-led explanation or a new question. This pattern reduced the potential for sustained dialogic exchange and aligns only partially with the kind of “community of inquiry” envisioned by Matthew Lipman, where ideas are collectively examined, challenged, and refined.
Closely related to this was the limited use of disagreement as a cognitive resource. While moments of conflict did emerge—for instance when children argued “I think they are needed” versus “I don’t think so”—these exchanges were typically resolved quickly through teacher intervention, rather than extended into deeper reasoning. The facilitator often summarized positions (“one thinks yes, another thinks no”) but did not invite children to justify, compare, or reconcile their viewpoints. Consequently, opportunities for developing critical thinking through argumentation remained underutilized, and disagreement functioned more as a social disruption than as a productive epistemic moment.
Another important hindering factor was the fragmented and high-noise interactional environment, particularly visible in the Miętowa group. Children frequently spoke over one another, engaged in side conversations, or introduced humorous or off-topic remarks. For example, during a discussion, children interjected comments such as “I saw a squirrel!” or reacted to environmental stimuli with statements like “that’s pee!”, shifting attention away from the shared topic. In other instances, the group became increasingly difficult to manage, with observations noting that “many children talk in between, joke, and it becomes hard to have a discussion”. While this reflects strong social energy, it also disrupts continuity, making it difficult to sustain collective focus or develop ideas over time.
The uneven distribution of participation also posed a challenge to collaborative processes. Older or more confident children tended to dominate verbal exchanges, while others remained silent, contributed minimally, or disengaged entirely. In one case, a child openly refused to participate in a group task and remained outside the activity despite attempts at encouragement. In other instances, children responded with brief or non-committal answers such as “I don’t know” or “I just chose it”, particularly during reflective discussions about photographs. These patterns indicate that participation was not only differentiated but also fragile, with some children lacking sufficient support or motivation to engage meaningfully in the collective process.
A further limitation concerns the predominance of parallel rather than truly collaborative activity, especially in hands-on tasks. Although activities were framed as group work — “remember, this is teamwork, you are creating one thing together”—children often divided the task into individual actions carried out side by side. As observed, “everyone worked individually, but based on a common agreement,” suggesting that collaboration occurred at the level of initial decision-making rather than ongoing joint problem-solving. This reduced opportunities for continuous negotiation, shared planning, and iterative improvement—key elements of collaborative knowledge building.
The structure of tasks and questions also sometimes constrained deeper thinking. Many questions posed by the facilitator were oriented toward identifying correct answers or recalling known relationships (e.g., “what does this animal need?”, “what happens without water?”), which encouraged short, factual responses rather than extended reasoning. In such contexts, children’s contributions tended to remain at the level of naming or simple explanation, without moving toward more complex forms of inquiry or reflection. This limits the development of metacognitive awareness, as children are rarely invited to think about how they know, why they think something, or how their ideas relate to others’.
In addition, while tools such as cameras and drawings introduced opportunities for reflection, these were not always fully realized. Children often engaged in the activity itself—taking photos, selecting objects—but struggled to articulate their choices or evaluate them critically. Responses such as “I don’t know” or “because I like it” suggest that the transition from action to reflection was only partially supported. This points to a gap between experience and explicit metacognition, which is crucial for deeper learning.
From a broader pedagogical perspective, these constraints indicate a partial misalignment with the principles of John Dewey and Maria Montessori. While the activities themselves were experiential and grounded in interaction with materials, the structure of discourse often remained teacher-centred, limiting children’s autonomy in directing inquiry and constructing meaning. Similarly, although the social environment allowed for interaction, it did not consistently function as a reflective community in the sense proposed by Matthew Lipman.
Finally, the presence of multiple adults, while supportive in terms of regulation, may have inadvertently reinforced a model in which adults remain the primary organizers of both behaviour and meaning, reducing opportunities for children to self-regulate, negotiate participation, or take ownership of the collective process.
In synthesis, the collaborative-participative process was hindered by a combination of teacher-directed discourse, underdeveloped use of dialogue and disagreement, fragmented group dynamics, uneven participation, and limited support for reflection and metacognition. These factors did not prevent participation, but they constrained its transformation into sustained, collective knowledge building, as envisioned in Knowledge Building.
Have children generated a shared knowledge about environmental issues? What was the process?
Across the observed sessions in both Lawendowa and Miętowa groups, environmental issues appeared in multiple contexts: during circle discussions, in embodied and constructive activities, through work with materials, and in direct observation of the environment. Children’s knowledge emerged both in spontaneous verbal contributions and in shared actions.
In both groups, discussions often included children naming elements of nature and identifying relationships between them. Children referred to elements such as water, air, sand, plants, and animals, and attempted to explain their roles, for example stating that “bees pollinate flowers and thanks to that we have fruit” and that “trees are needed for breathing”. Children described nature as a “cycle” and identified relationships such as trees providing oxygen for humans or water flowing between environments and supporting life.
An important component of the process involved activities in which children constructed and enacted environmental relationships. In the “network of life” activity, children represented elements of nature and were physically connected with a string. When disruptions were introduced (e.g., pollution or deforestation), children reacted collectively and commented on changes in the system (“the water is polluted”, “everything is changing”). In other activities, children connected elements using images or built shared structures (e.g., a “village of nature”) from materials found in the environment, assigning meaning to different elements and discussing their roles.
Environmental issues were also addressed through the way the teacher introduced and developed the topic during the sessions. References appeared to waste, pollution, and the effects of overuse, for example in discussions about excessive paper use or contamination of water. Everyday situations were frequently evoked, such as turning off the tap, not wasting resources, or disposing of waste properly. In this way, environmental care was connected to concrete actions and familiar experiences.
Within this context, children also referred to human actions and ways of caring for the environment. They mentioned actions such as not cutting trees, planting new ones, saving paper, turning off water, throwing rubbish into bins, and recycling. In one case, a child noted that without caring for the environment, it could become “one big rubbish dump”.
At the same time, nature was often implicitly framed as a resource that needs to be maintained in order to continue supporting human life and use. Children’s explanations frequently referred to what nature provides – such as oxygen from trees, food from plants, or materials like wood – and their suggestions for environmental care were often connected to preserving these functions. In this sense, caring for the environment was closely linked to ensuring that these resources remain available.
Direct observation also played an important role. Children noticed environmental phenomena (e.g., a frozen stream with flowing water underneath), observed animals, and formulated interpretations. Through tools such as Google Earth, they explored different environments and discussed living conditions for humans and animals.
Knowledge was further developed through revisiting and representing previous experiences, for example through drawings and photographs, which were later discussed and interpreted as examples of relationships in nature.
During the sessions, children brought their own perspectives, ideas, and experiences, often providing examples to support their statements. They asked questions, responded to prompts, and attempted to explain relationships. They also participated in decision-making processes, especially in group tasks, where they proposed ideas, voted, and responded to others’ suggestions.
Interactions among children included both short exchanges and more engaged moments of discussion. Children expressed different viewpoints, reacted to others’ ideas, and at times referred to each other’s reasoning. In one notable moment, a boy stated: “The world is like a big body that we need to take care of”.
This statement was acknowledged and appreciated by the group – children began clapping, and the teacher highlighted its significance – demonstrating a shared moment of meaning-making.
While active participation was widespread, older children more frequently led the discourse, while others participated through action, observation, or shorter responses.
The teacher functioned as a facilitator—initiating activities, guiding attention, structuring discussion, and introducing new content—while also supporting group organization and participation.
In summary, children generated elements of shared environmental knowledge through the combination of discussion, action, observation, and representation, with this process closely tied to the specific situations and activities in which they were engaged. At the same time, the development of these ideas often remained closely connected to immediate contexts and experiences, with many contributions appearing as short, situation-based responses rather than extended lines of shared exploration, suggesting potential for further deepening and continuity of collective inquiry.
What fostered children's environmental awareness and the promotion of their active role in addressing climate change issues and promoting environmental sustainability?
Children’s environmental awareness and engagement were supported by a combination of teacher-guided facilitation, experience-based activities, material mediation, and connections to everyday life.
One of the most significant enabling factors was the use of embodied and participatory activities, such as the “network of life,” perspective-taking tasks, and collaborative construction. These activities allowed children to experience environmental interdependence not only verbally but physically and imaginatively. For example, when connections in the “network” were disrupted (e.g., pollution or deforestation), children reacted collectively, noticing changes across the system. In other moments, children were encouraged to consider what different organisms need to live (e.g., water, food, shelter), which supported understanding relationships in the environment from multiple viewpoints.
Another important factor was the grounding of environmental issues in familiar, everyday contexts. Discussions referred to concrete practices such as turning off the tap after washing hands, not wasting paper, or disposing of waste in appropriate bins. These examples were directly connected to children’s daily routines, making environmental responsibility tangible and accessible, and positioning children as active participants capable of contributing through their own actions.
Children’s awareness was further supported by exposure to multiple sources and representations of knowledge, which enabled them to encounter environmental issues from different perspectives and scales. These included direct observation of nature (e.g., noticing that a frozen stream still contains flowing water, observing animals such as a squirrel), visual materials such as photographs (e.g., images of life in waste sites), and video recordings (e.g., time-lapse sequences showing plant growth from a seed). Such materials expanded the context of discussion beyond immediate experience, introducing broader ecological and social dimensions and supporting connections between local observations and more global environmental issues.
The use of multiple forms of representation and observation also supported reflection. Drawing relationships in nature (e.g., animal–habitat connections), taking photographs of elements of nature in the classroom, and exploring environments through tools such as Google Earth enabled children to revisit and interpret environmental relationships from different perspectives. For instance, when exploring different regions (e.g., deserts, forests, polar areas), children discussed the presence or absence of plants, animals, and human habitation.
Children’s awareness was further supported by opportunities for collective action and decision-making, particularly during group tasks. Activities such as building a shared “village of nature” from natural materials or deciding collectively whether to keep or dismantle a constructed structure required children to negotiate, propose ideas, and consider group decisions. These situations fostered a sense of responsibility and participation within a collective context.
The role of the teacher was also significant in fostering environmental awareness. Through questioning, paraphrasing, and introducing concrete examples (e.g., waste, pollution, resource use), the teacher connected children’s ideas to broader environmental concepts while keeping them grounded in familiar situations.
Finally, children’s emotional engagement—expressed through enthusiasm, curiosity, and shared reactions – played an important role. Moments of collective excitement (e.g., observing a squirrel during outdoor exploration, collaboratively building a “village of nature” from found materials, or reacting to images and digital representations of different environments) and recognition of meaningful contributions (such as the statement that “the world is like a big body we need to take care of”) supported a shared sense of relevance and importance of environmental issues.
What might have hindered children's environmental awareness and their active role in addressing climate change issues and promoting environmental sustainability?
While children actively engaged with environmental topics, several factors shaped the depth and continuity of this engagement.
One factor relates to the structure of interaction, which was often strongly guided by the teacher. Questions frequently led to short, focused responses (e.g., naming elements, identifying functions), which supported participation but sometimes limited the development of extended dialogue or deeper collective exploration of ideas. Children’s contributions were often acknowledged and rephrased, but less frequently taken up and elaborated by peers.
Another aspect concerns the dynamic and fragmented nature of discussions, where multiple ideas emerged rapidly and simultaneously (e.g., children speaking at the same time, providing parallel answers). While this reflected high engagement, it sometimes resulted in a broad range of contributions rather than sustained focus on a single environmental issue or line of inquiry.
The distribution of participation also influenced the process. Older or more verbally confident children tended to contribute more frequently in discussions, while others participated through action (e.g., building, handling materials), observation, or brief responses. As a result, the development of shared understanding was shaped by differing modes and levels of participation.
In addition, environmental understanding often remained closely connected to immediate, concrete contexts, such as everyday actions (e.g., saving water, not littering, feeding animals). While these provided an important foundation, connections to broader or more complex environmental and climate-related processes (e.g., long-term environmental change or global interdependencies) were less explicitly developed within the observed sessions.
Finally, the framing of nature—as observed in both children’s and teacher’s discourse—often emphasized its role as a resource supporting human needs. Environmental care was frequently linked to maintaining access to what nature provides (e.g., oxygen from trees, food from animals and plants, materials such as wood), which supported practical engagement and responsibility. At the same time, this orientation reflects a predominantly anthropocentric perspective, in which nature is understood primarily in relation to human use, leaving less space for exploring non-human-centred or ecological viewpoints.
How have children used Digital Technologies?
Digital technologies were used primarily as tools for observation, documentation, revisiting experience and supporting collaborative inquiry, rather than as isolated objects of instruction. Across both groups, technology was consistently embedded in broader exploratory processes and often extended children’s direct sensory encounters with the environment rather than replacing them. Children used cameras to photograph natural relationships and details, experimented with zoom, focus and framing, revisited photographs through projection and discussion, explored global and local perspectives through Google Earth, and participated in media-making activities such as creating advertisements. These technologies were used not only to view digital content but to document, compare, represent and collaboratively interpret experience.
A central use of digital technologies concerned photography as a tool for noticing. In both groups children used phones or cameras to photograph relationships in nature, textures, details and objects encountered during exploration. These activities encouraged children to treat photography not only as a way of recording what they saw, but also as a way of looking more carefully and noticing details. In Lawendowa especially, children were encouraged to experiment with zoom, focus, distance and framing, and through this began noticing that what appears depends on how one looks. Through experimentation and discussion, they developed an emerging understanding of basic technological functions and their possible uses in practice, learning what zoom, focus or positioning could do through direct experience. Conversations around whether a picture was too blurry, what was placed in the centre, or whether zoom helped reveal something hidden suggested that technology became part of learning how to observe.
In Miętowa, photography had a more social and exploratory character. Children shared their own experiences with cameras, compared different devices and supported one another while using them. For example, during the activity in small groups, older children helped younger ones operate the phone camera, return to the camera application when someone exited it, and decide what could be photographed in the classroom. This showed that technology use was not only individual, but also became a shared practical task in which children exchanged instructions, suggestions and interpretations.
An important aspect of these observations was that photography often did not end with taking pictures. Images were revisited collectively through projection and discussion. Children recognized their own photographs, commented on what was visible, recalled how images had been made and responded to others’ interpretations. This was particularly visible in Miętowa, where the projected photographs became a starting point for discussing not only what had been captured, but also how images represent reality. For example, when one child drew an object from the classroom and another photographed it, the group compared both representations and discussed which one was more detailed and why. Children also reflected on whether two people can take exactly the same photograph, noticing that even similar images may differ because of distance, angle, zoom or framing. In these moments, projection turned photographs into shared objects of attention: the group could return to an earlier experience, compare what different children had noticed, and discuss whether an image clearly showed what the photographer intended. Teachers often deepened these moments through open-ended questions rather than evaluative responses, helping sustain dialogue around observation and representation.
In the Lawendowa group, technology often functioned as an extension of careful environmental observation. Digital tools were not introduced as separate devices to be mastered, but as ways of returning to and deepening what children had already noticed in nature. The use of zoom and close-up photography supported attention to detail, textures and relationships that might otherwise remain unnoticed. In this sense, technology amplified observation already underway rather than redirecting attention away from the environment.
In Miętowa, digital technologies often supported shared exploration and dialogue more strongly. Children’s use of devices frequently included peer support and practical collaboration. For example, during small-group photography work, older children helped younger ones operate the phone camera, return to the camera application when someone exited it, and decide what could be photographed in the classroom. This showed that technology use was not only individual, but also became a shared task in which children exchanged instructions, suggestions and interpretations. In such moments, digital tools supported collaboration at the level of both technical use and meaning-making.
Another relevant strand of the observations involved children comparing not only images, but also the possibilities offered by different tools and modes of representation. Although comparison between technological devices themselves was less explicit than in Sowa Zuzu, children often explored differences between what could be perceived directly, through zoomed photography, through drawing or through digital mapping. For example, discussions around photographs and drawings helped children notice that different media can show the same object in different ways, while moving between the physical globe and Google Earth opened questions about scale, distance and location. These comparisons supported an emerging awareness that tools do not simply reproduce reality, but organize how it can be seen and discussed.
Google Earth offered another important strand of technological engagement. Here technologies supported geographical imagination and environmental questioning by allowing children to move between familiar surroundings and distant places. Children explored views of the Earth, continents, deserts, oceans and polar regions, and discussions often moved between recognition, hypothesis and imaginative speculation. Teachers played a key role by guiding attention through questions and comparisons, for example helping children connect what they saw on the screen with previous knowledge about climate, plants, animals or human life in different environments. A notable feature in both groups was that digital technologies were frequently linked with other modes of learning. Photographs led into drawing; digital exploration prompted discussion; environmental observation connected with documentation. This multimodal use appeared significant because technologies did not dominate activity but became one element within a broader process involving sensory exploration, dialogue, creative representation and collective reflection.
Overall, children’s engagement with digital technologies suggested an emerging awareness that tools shape observation and representation. This appeared in concrete ways: noticing that zoom changes what can be seen, discussing whether photographs preserve memories, questioning whether cameras show things exactly as they are, or exploring how views from above differ from everyday perception. Children used digital technologies less as tools to acquire technical competence and more as instruments for observing, documenting, comparing perspectives and revisiting shared experiences.
What fostered a critical approach to digital technologies?
What might have hindered a critical approach to digital technologies?
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