Annica Löfdahl

Grounds for Values and Attitudes: Children's Play and Peer-Cultures in Pre-School.

This study discusses how children make use of the content in play to get a superior status position in their peer-culture and looks at some implications for values education. Observations of children age three to six years were made during their free playtime in pre-school, and both field notes and videotape recording were used for data collection. Analysis of content in children’s peer-cultures was carried out through Corsaro’s perspective of interpretive reproduction. The social structure in children’s peer-culture is of great importance, and by interpreting communication in play, strategies were found that developed status positions. Results showed that pre-school children both make use of and contribute to attitudes and values of inequality and justice.

Between control and resistance: planning and evaluation texts in the Swedish preschool

This article contains results from a study based on locally produced planning and evaluation texts from 10 preschool settings in a Swedish middle‐sized town. The texts were mainly from 1999 to 2005, a period during which Swedish preschools were implementing their first curriculum and were subject to several changes including decentralisation, marketisation and competition which taken together brought new demands on visibility. The overarching aim is to investigate and describe the meaning of content and formulations in the texts in relation to the teachers’ professionalism in this era of performativity. The texts were analysed as institutional narratives that underline what the preschool is and ought to be and we thereby regard the texts as governing. Analyses based on the theoretical concepts of technologies and positioning not only show how the teachers are simultaneously controlled and control themselves by the descriptions in the texts, but also how they position themselves as highly professional and present resistance to the control. One conclusion drawn from the analyses is that the profession of the teacher is changing and a new way of being professional might be to be good at positioning oneself.

The Funeral: A Study of Children's Shared Meaning-Making and Its Developmental Significance.

This article argues the need to examine communication in joint play situations rather than individual assessments in solitary play situations when childrens development is focused. Informed by Bakhtins dialogical and Moscovicis interactionist perspectives, observations were made of the interaction between two girls, aged 3½ and 4, playing at holding a funeral ceremony, in the setting of a Swedish pre‐school. The analysis shows that new knowledge occurred through negotiations of appropriate actions in play. The childrens interactions resulted in shared meaning‐making of the funeral as a ritual of revival.

Preschool’s new suit: care in terms of learning and knowledge

This article focuses on aspects of the notion of care in relation to the work of quality documentation in the Swedish preschool. Questions deal with how teachers enact pedagogy in relation to the documentation work; how they handle the demands of visibility; and which aspects of the teacher profession are exposed and which are silenced. Data consist of observations from staff meetings at a preschool and interviews with preschool teachers and their managers while discussing the work of documenting quality in the preschool. Our analytical tools are based on theories of teacher professionalism, combined with education policy. Our results show that the preschool staff rarely talk about care and that difficulty in describing and documenting the meaning of care leads them to use various professional strategies whereby they escape the challenges and transform care into children’s learning and knowledge.

Institutional narratives within the performative preschool in Sweden: ‘if we write that we're no good, that's not good publicity!’

An increasingly important part of the work of preschool staff in Sweden today is to present their activities outwardly, including producing and presenting quality accounts of their activities and making them visible to a public audience. To grasp the local narratives, interviews were conducted with a few teachers and their school leader, aiming to describe how they reason about the work of formulating their activities in publicly accessible documents, and the consequences of this work. Theoretical concepts used for analysis and conclusions are performativity, which views performances as a means of control and change, and institutional narratives, as means to understand the effects of the local context on how activities and teaching are performed. Results show that the staff find and discuss detours in the presentation of their activities, where possible failings are made opaque. Paradoxically, such ‘detour actions’ will at the same time be disciplinary as the teachers adjust to the logic of performativity. Implications for policy and practice are discussed.

Morality in parents’ stories of preschool choice: narrating identity positions of good parenting

This article aims to contribute to our understanding of how moral aspects of parents’ choices of preschool play a part in the processes of marketisation and privatisation of childcare in Sweden. The paper explores parents’ narratives of preschool choice as moral claims of parental identities. The analysed data are based on a study of how parents make sense of their preschool choice during life-story interviews. Our results point out good parenting as having to do with making distinctions between what is ‘good and bad’ and ‘right and wrong’ regardless of whether the choices concern preschools or the behaviour of preschool teachers and parents. Culturally available discourses become visible through the making of these distinctions in ways that ultimately point to the subject position of parents as particular choosers as related to a prevailing discourse of parental responsibility.