Agency, guidance and gender – interrelated aspects of early childhood education settings

The study investigates how kindergarten teachers’ guidance of children is related to prevailing kindergarten norms and gender norms, and how this affects both gender patterns and children’s agency in kindergarten. The research question is: How can kindergarten teachers’ guidance, gender norms and children’s agency be understood in relation to each other?

The results show that kindergarten teachers actively guide the children in accordance with applicable norms and desired behaviour. While some children adapt to the guidance, other children challenge it. In this way, these children try to create greater room for manoeuvre than what the kindergarten teachers have planned for. The guidance of boys and girls also follows traditional gender norms. Boys who are perceived as calm and cautious receive a lot of guidance. The researchers believe this indicates that boys are expected to be more active than girls and that the guidance therefore has consequences for both sexes: Girls are expected to be calm and cautious, i.e. passive, while boys are expected to be more active. According to the researchers, the children risk being deprived of their agency as a result of the guidance they receive. They therefore encourage kindergartens to adopt a gender-aware perspective regarding guidance.

The study is a re-analysis of an ethnographic observational study in two Swedish kindergartens published in 2016. In this study, the researchers use the collected empirical data to take a closer look at guidance, gender norms and children’s agency in kindergarten seen from the children’s perspective. The data material consists of video observations of 47 children (22 girls and 25 boys) and eleven kindergarten teachers from three departments at a Swedish kindergarten.

Rantala, A. & Heikkilä, M. (2020). “Agency, guidance and gender – interrelated aspects of early childhood education settings”. Education 3-13 - International Journal of Primary, Elementary and Early Years Education, 48(4):483-493.