I Want to Participate—Communities of Practice in Foraging and Gardening Projects as a Contribution to Social and Cultural Sustainability in Early Childhood Education

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report

Thank you for offering me the opportunity to review this manuscript. It is an interesting manuscript and very much relevant to the ECEfS field.

There are some grammatical errors that require proofreading.

Abstract: Who are the KG staff? Are they teachers, learning support assistants, etc.?

Keywords: the term "cultural learning" could be changed to "cultural sustainability" as the latter is the dominant term in this manuscript.

Introduction: You may wish to add some recent literature related to ECEfS as well. This is one example: Spiteri, J. (2020). Early Childhood Education for Sustainability. In Leal Filho, W., Azul, A., Brandli, L., Ozuyar, P., & Wall, T. (eds). Quality Education. Encyclopedia of the UN Sustainable Development Goals. Cham: Springer, https://doi.org/10/1007/978-3-319-69902-8_114-1

Data analyzes: Provide some brief information about CoP theory following the first sentence in this section. This will help the reader understand how the CoP theory had been utilized in the data analyzes process.

Results: Kindly include data from teachers in the teachers' agency section of the results. For example, section 3.1 does not include any data from teachers to support the assertions made. Is it possible to name the participants (adults and children) to help the reader understand who is saying what?

When drawing on your data in Table 1, please do include full quotes from participants rather than parts of quotes to help their voices to emerge. For example, instead of simply saying, "I want to ...." provide the full quote from your data. 

Discussion and conclusion: These section need to clearly indicate how the findings of this study benefit ECEfS. The field of ECEfS will benefit a lot from this study but such benefits need to be explicitly stated in these sections as these are not clear yet.

 

Author Response

Dear Reviewer 1,

Thank you for your review and comments on our manuscript. Our changes in the manuscript is marked in yellow. Below is our response from your review report:

There are some grammatical errors that require proofreading. 

Response: We will have proofreading after the second round. There was no time to do it now.

Abstract: Who are the KG staff? Are they teachers, learning support assistants, etc.?  

Response: We agree and we have changed this in the manuscript to "teachers and assistants".  

 Keywords: the term "cultural learning" could be changed to "cultural sustainability" as the latter is the dominant term in this manuscript.  

Response: We agree, and this has been changed. 

Introduction: You may wish to add some recent literature related to ECEfS as well. This is one example: Spiteri, J. (2020). Early Childhood Education for Sustainability. In Leal Filho, W., Azul, A., Brandli, L., Ozuyar, P., & Wall, T. (eds). Quality Education. Encyclopedia of the UN Sustainable Development Goals. Cham: Springer, https://doi.org/10/1007/978-3-319-69902-8_114-1  

Response: We have used recent literature that we think is most relevant for this paper. This suggested paper was considered, but not included in our literature. 

Data analyzes: Provide some brief information about CoP theory following the first sentence in this section. This will help the reader understand how the CoP theory had been utilized in the data analyzes process.  

Response: We have clarified this in the manuscript.  

Results: Kindly include data from teachers in the teachers' agency section of the results. For example, section 3.1 does not include any data from teachers to support the assertions made. Is it possible to name the participants (adults and children) to help the reader understand who is saying what?  

Response: Yes, we have included some more staff quotes, and gone through quotes to ensure that it is clear wheter the children or the staff are expressing it. 

When drawing on your data in Table 1, please do include full quotes from participants rather than parts of quotes to help their voices to emerge. For example, instead of simply saying, "I want to ...." provide the full quote from your data.  

Response: A good suggestion, we agree and we have given some full quotes. But we put these in the text to avoid too long sentences in tables 

Discussion and conclusion: These section need to clearly indicate how the findings of this study benefit ECEfS. The field of ECEfS will benefit a lot from this study but such benefits need to be explicitly stated in these sections as these are not clear yet. 

Response: We have clarified the benefit of our study for ECEfS. 

We hope this will accomodate your requests for improvements of our manuscript.

Best regards,

Veronica Bergan

  

Reviewer 2 Report

This paper is about interesting research at an interesting place in the north of the Nordic countries. Its strength is the content but its weakness is its overall presentation.

Following comments could be of help:

• What are the actual research questions of the paper? In the discussions two main research questions are presented, but they are not clear to the reader in the introduction nor in the methods chapter.
• Line 139: You say: ... ECE can be categorised ... Reviewer thinks it would be more humble to say ... if they can be categorised ...
• In the methods-chapter, state the research questions clearly and explain/argue WHY these methods of data collection are the most appropriate. Why did you do semi-structured interviews and why did you do the videos? There are no explanations of your selection of methods in relation to the research questions.
• Line 178: You say that The questions were connected to ...
  Explain what you mean by "connected to" and give the reader some examples (so we know what you actually asked about).
• Line 186: ... the role of the children in the activities. Is this "item" one of the research questions, i.e. to identify what is the role of children in the activities?
• Line 219: You say ... with respect to the children's active participation and engagement in the activities. Is this a research question (to identify where/how children are active participants)?
• Line 244: You end the paragraph by telling the reader what you "observed" in the videos. Do you mean what you "analysed" or what you "found" when you went through the videos?
  Also, you tell the reader that you observed HOW they explored together – but you don't explain what was the result (tell us HOW they explored together, describe it at least).
• The tables. How are they to be read (or used by the reader)? Are these tables summaries of results for each category? 
  
  • Are the "items" presented in each category some type of sub-categories, that are supposed to be presented in the each table (e.g. one line for each sub-category).
  • To explain: Are interest, passion, identity and curiosity sub-categories of the The Domain category? If so, does each "line" in the table represent each sub-category?
  • In sum: How you organised the content of the tables is NOT clear, nor is the structure of the contend explained (the text above the tables is not helpful.
• Line 277-294: You provide descriptions of what you claim to be staff's agency. At the end of these two paragraphs, try to sum up what this means (and possibly relate your summary to "answering" the research questions.
• Line 300: ... was also confirmed by the videos (videos do not confirm anything - people do that).
  Possibly a sentence like that could get you on the track: In the analysis of the videos it became evident ...
• In the discussions you present 14 new references (no. 43-57). This is not in line with mainstream research presentation and comes as a surprise to the reader.
  • You should discuss the results USING the references you have already presented (in the literature review)!
• Tell the reader the answers to the research questions, explain your limitations and what needs to be further researched.
• The overall presentation of this paper seem normative, i.e. that you are proving a point (you already had before doing the reseach).
• Also, it would be very helpful you you get a thorough English proof reading.

 

 

Author Response

Dear reviewer 2,

Thank you for reviewing our manuscript "I want to participate- Communities of practice in harvesting and gardening projects as a contribution to social and cultural sustainability in early childhood education". We have made major changes according to your comments and requests. The changes are highlighted in yellow in the new version of the manuscript. However, some changes may be too small to be highlighed or lost (removed text from the previous version). English proofreading will be done after the second round. We did not have time for that now.

See the attached file for our responses to your suggestions. 

Thank you so much for reviewing our work.

Best regards,

Veronica Bergan

Author Response File: Author Response.docx

Round 2

Reviewer 1 Report

Thanks for the opportunity to review this paper. It is an interesting paper that talks about a very timely issue in ECEfS. It is good to see most of the reviewer's suggestions have been addressed and these have been highlighted (much appreciated). However, some of the suggestions of the reviewer were not addressed. 

Author Response

Dear Reviewer 1,

Thank you for your time and effort with your review. It has improved our paper immensely!

We have now included four new references in the manuscript. One suggested by you in the first round: reference no. 8, and three of more recent date, no. 7, 34, 40. We have also provided English proofreading on the entire paper and done changes according to requests from reviewer 2. All significant changes are highlighted.

Hope this will be sufficient for our approval of the manuscript.

Best regards,

Veronica Bergan

Reviewer 2 Report

This paper has improved considerably. It needs however a proper English proofreading that will eliminate errors of e.g. verb tenses.

Following points using the line numbers are provided and are hopefully of help:

• Line 46; as it highlights in social learning ...
• Line 59: in stead of saying This deals ... it is suggested that you say: The reason for this focus is it deals ...
• Line 75: It is not helpful to give the year 0. It would be better to indicate from what actual age you have children in kindergarten. Is it 6 month old, 8 months, ...
• Line 163: In previous work we have shown ... It is to arrogant tone. It is more humble, but still a clear statement, to say: we have learned ...
• Lines 172–176 The research questions: According to what can be read out of this paper you were looking for TO WHAT EXTENT CAN THE ECE PROJECTS ...
  It is the reviewers opinion that you should use that words (to what extent) giving the research some chance to not being able to be recognised and categorised as CoP (otherwise the normative tone comes forward - as you know before hand that it CAN be recognised and categorised as CoP)!
• Line 197: fish WAS caught ...
• Line 228: ..., in accordance to Green (the language needs to be polished). You cannot just "name-drop" Green here. It does not work well.
• Line 230: strengthen ... It is suggested you rather use: explore further
• Table 1, 2 and 3: Give each table a NAME. Then put this exploration-text into the text, not as a name of the table.
  Also, refer to the table in the text, telling the reader when to move his/her attention to it (look at it). It is not acceptable just to put table 1 in the heading of this sub-chapter!
• Line 443: you state the third aim was to establish whether ...
  It this was the aim, the rephrase the research question accordingly.
• Line 557:  Learning occurred even ... It is suggestion you use the word also here.

 

Author Response

Dear reviewer 2,

Thank you very much for your thorough review on our paper. It has improved our work immensely!

We have now had English proofreading on the entire text, however, the proofreading is not highlighted as changes. The requested changes are highlighted however. 

We have also included four new references due to requests from reviewer 1 (also highlighted). 

The research questions has been refined as requested. 

The tables do now have a title and some of the text that was included in the tables is now in the result section text (line 280-286). We also refer to the tables in the text (highlighted). 

Everything that you have suggested as changes has been adressed. We hope this version of our manuscript will be acceptable for publication.

Kind regards,

Veronica Bergan