Physical Environments of Early Childhood Education Centres: Facilitating and Inhibiting Factors Supporting Children’s Participation

A normative demand placed on early childhood centres by political actors and education theorists is that they should promote participation by children. Numerous publications have set out recommendations for early childhood teachers on how to promote participation in their day-to-day activities. The present study considers the role of the environment in facilitating children’s participation through a visual environmental analysis, using photographs from two group environments in two different centres across three countries (Germany, New Zealand, and the USA). The analyses distinguished between environmental features of: transparency, structure, flexibility and responsivity, accessibility of materials, functional diversity, and representations of children in the environment. The findings demonstrate that a systematic approach to the analysis of physical environments can provide greater understanding about how environments may facilitate or constrain young children’s participation in early childhood centres. This study contributes to the methodological development for this field of analyses in early childhood education.