Children Crossing Borders: School Visits as Initial Incorporation Rites in Transition to Preschool Class.

The main purpose of this study is to gain an insight into how to characterise children's transition process from daycare centre (förskola) to school at the end of their time at daycare centre. The study therefore contributes knowledge about how the children experience the transition process before their actual transition to school. The objective of this study is to gain the children's perspective of their transition from daycare centre to school.

The study shows how children enter the transition process from daycare centre to pre-school class long before they actually start or visit the new school. The transition process already begins at the daycare centre, for example through preparing the children for visiting the school, and through conversations between the educators and the children about the visits and the transition.

On the basis of the results, the study argues that the preparatory events should be viewed as important preparation for children in the transition from daycare centre to school. These events help the children to clarify their expectations of the new surroundings. However, the children experience the preparations for the transition as blurry and unclear, and therefore they find it difficult to relate to them. Therefore, it is important that the teachers support the children in the transition process.

The study concludes that children's transition process from daycare centre to school can be characterised as a circular or spiral-shaped process rather than a linear process. The children are engaged in several encounters with the border between the daycare centre and the school before they actually start school. Each time they cross this border, the children return to the daycare centre and reconstruct their experiences and expectations of school. During visits to the school, the children encounter new routines, new teachers, and new future classmates and they start to form a new group identity. During these practice visits to the school, the teachers prepare the children for the transition through events that help the children to find meaning in new contexts. However, the transition to school is not only adaptation to new surroundings, it also includes deconstruction of old surroundings and practices. For instance, the children have to learn new morning routines (saying good morning to the teacher and shaking hands) and learn what to do when the bell rings. The children also find new friends at school and break with old friends.

The data material was collected on the basis of three-months’ ethnographic field work in a Swedish daycare centre, in which the children visited the school prior to their transition from daycare centre.

The study focusses on the children's experiences in the period in which they are being prepared to start school. The researcher followed two daycare-centre groups with ten children each. All children were 5 years-old at the beginning of the study. Data was generated through observations of participants, informal interviews with children and adults (at the daycare centre and at the school) as well as photos and video footage of the children. This has resulted in 30 hours of observation of the two groups, almost 270 minutes of video material, just over 400 minutes of recorded interviews, more than 500 photos as well as 17 drawings and reports from the early childhood educators. Since the article is part of a larger project, only an extract of this material is presented in this article. Emphasis is on acknowledging the children's skills as informants (child perspective) as an important element in the collection and analysis of data. The analysis was conducted as an interaction between empiricism and the theoretical framework. The theoretical concepts which form the framework of the analysis are borders, transitions and identity.

Ackesjö, H. (2013). Children Crossing Borders: School Visits as Initial Incorporation Rites in Transition to Preschool Class. International Journal of Early Childhood, 45 (3), 387-410.