Search

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.

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.

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. (Contains 4 notes.)

The article discusses how children make use of their preschool context in order to withdraw. Ethnographic observations were made of two-to five-year-old children's interactions during free play and teacher-led activities in the preschool, and documentation was carried out through field notes and video recordings. The empirical material was analysed using Corsaro's theory on children's peer cultures. Results show that children, in their peer cultures, construct withdrawal strategies--"making oneself inaccessible" and "creating and protecting shared hidden spaces"--by making use of the preschool's organization of time and space. (Contains 1 note.)

This article argues the need to examine communication in joint play situations rather than individual assessments in solitary play situations when children's development is focused. Informed by Bakhtin's dialogical and Moscovici's interactionist perspectives, observations were made of the interaction between two girls, aged 3 1/2 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 children's interactions resulted in shared meaning-making of the funeral as a ritual of revival.