Making the invisible visible? Everyday lived experiences of ’seeing’ and categorizing children’s well-being within a Danish kindergarten

The study aims to investigate how kindergarten teachers assess and categorise children’s well-being in everyday life in a kindergarten that caters for large numbers of socially vulnerable children. Based on ethnographic fieldwork, the article focuses on a recently implemented well-being assessment tool that is oriented towards highlighting the needs of all children through the kindergarten teacher’s colour categorisation of their well-being. 

The kindergarten teachers experienced the assessment tool as being time-consuming in an already stressful workday. The colour categorisation was seen as a burden because one had to have a written plan for all the children who were categorised as red. The majority of kindergarten teachers perceived that the action plan was not helpful in their pedagogical work that focused on children’s well-being. As a result, it was common that the action plan remained unread in the document drawer of the staff room.

Furthermore, it was found that children who were not considered as being at risk prior to assessment did not necessarily become more visible in the final categorisation. It also became apparent that the categorisation of the children often reflected conditions outside the kindergarten, such as the children’s family backgrounds. Therefore, the categorisation tool could not necessarily be used to highlight the children’s needs at a municipal level, which was the goal. In practice, the tool became a way to legitimise how certain children are made invisible in an environment that has limited resources.

The study was conducted over the course of one year (2016-2017). The author spent two months in a public kindergarten on the outskirts of Copenhagen near an area of social housing that is politically defined as a ‘migrant ghetto’. The kindergarten mainly cared for children between the ages of 3 and 6 from ethnic minority families. During these two months, the author observed and participated in the everyday life of the kindergarten to get a sense of the situated perceptions of children’s well-being and the local context in which the assessment tool was introduced and used. The data was collected through ethnographic fieldwork in the kindergarten, in addition to qualitative interviews with educators and parents.

Houmøller, K. (2018). "Making the invisible visible? Everyday lived experiences of ’seeing’ and categorizing children’s well-being within a Danish kindergarten". Childhood, 25(4):488-500.