The social construction of the competent, self-governed child in documentation: Panels in the Swedish preschool

The purpose of this study is to investigate how constructions of the competent and self-governed child are expressed through documentation panels used to document children's activities in preschool.

Overall, the study shows that the documentation panels focus on everyday life in preschool and on rendering visible the children's social competences, cognitive development and verbal skills. Thus the researchers found that the documentation panels depict the children in three basic ways: the child as a good pal (social competences), the child as an autonomous investigator (cognitive development) and the child as a public speaker (verbal skills). According to the researchers, the documentation panels thereby also construct children as competent in different respects, and with recurring references to the pre-defined goals and ideals of the national curriculum. According to the authors, the results indicate that the curriculum's presentation of what the authors call "the ideal child", i.e. the competent and self-governed child who achieves the goals of the curriculum by own agency, contribute to the construction of "the ideal child" in the documentation panels. This means that the documentation panels reflect what appears as "the ideal child" in the curriculum.

The researchers suggest that, even though there seem to be tensions between the curriculum goals and the documented preschool activities, the curriculum goals still frame the preschool teachers' documentation of the children's activities. This means that the children who are not particularly interested in or curious about achieving the curriculum goals are not included in the documentation. According to the researchers, the results indicate that documentation is used as a way of realising the goals set out in the national curriculum.

The researchers visited four preschools in one day, where they took pictures of the documentation panels displayed. The data material consists of photographs depicting the children's activities, and associated texts written by the preschool teachers. The texts consist of quotations from the children, and descriptions of the children's bodily actions. Twenty examples from the data material were selected for analysis because they had a pedagogical aim. The data material selected was then linked with quotations from the national curriculum (Lpfö 98). In the analysis, the researchers applied a content analytical approach.

Liljestrand, J., & Hammarberg, A. (2017). The social construction of the competent, self-governed child in documentation: Panels in the Swedish preschool. Contemporary Issues in Early Childhood, 18(1), 39-54.