Children, sub-headings and verbal discussions creating evaluations: acknowledging the productiveness of ambivalence

The study investigates the roles and relationships that arise during an evaluation meeting in a Swedish kindergarten. The author investigates how the evaluations are created in relationships between employees, in discussions about children’s play activities, evaluation goals and subheadings in the evaluation forms, and how these activities eventually manifest themselves in the final evaluation text.

The analysis of the meeting and the text that became the final result shows that the theme and subheadings of the evaluation form in many ways defined the parts of the discussion that arose among the teachers which were then turned into text. The discussions that arose during the meeting were governed by what the kindergarten teachers found difficult, and which they were ambivalent and unsure about in everyday kindergarten life (for example, children’s play fighting and war games). However, these discussions were excluded from the final evaluation text. In this way, the evaluation form’s goals and subcategories governed which parts of everyday kindergarten life were evaluated and which parts were disregarded. The author believes that this led to the meeting’s documentation becoming disconnected from the practice it was supposed to account for.

The sample consists of nine kindergarten teachers from five different kindergartens in Stockholm, all of whom participated in an all-day evaluation meeting at the end of a kindergarten semester. The empirical data are taken both from the observation of the meeting and the analysis of the evaluation text produced during the meeting. Actor-network theory was used as both a methodological and theoretical starting point.

Moberg, E. (2018). “Children, sub-headings and verbal discussions creating evaluations: acknowledging the productiveness of ambivalence”. Pedagogy, Culture & Society, 26(3):363-379.