Environmental and Developmental Psychology and Early Childhood Education: is there a possible integration?

Abstract

This paper aimed to show the integration between Environmental Psychology, Developmental Psychology, and Early Childhood Education, focusing on two groups of empirical studies on spatial organization in day-care centers: (1) studies on spatial arrangement (the way in which furniture / equipments are arranged in rooms for 1-2/2-3/3-4 year-old children); (2) studies on a North-American scale for assessing the quality of center-based child care, and another study on principles of quality of day-care centers in national and foreign documents. The first group has shown that spatial arrangement is one of the environmental elements which mediate interaction between child-child and child-educator, favoring certain educational and interactive practices and avoiding others. The second group has indicated that the scale is suitable for the Brazilian context and quality indicators can be shared. Such empirical data demonstrate the possibility of integrating Environmental Psychology, Developmental Psychology and Early Childhood Education.