Meningsskaping i barnehagen: innhold og bruk av barns og voksnes samtalefortellinger.

This dissertation examines kindergartens for the youngest children as a cultural and culture-making forum. The purpose of this dissertation is to describe, analyse and reflect on the common meaning-making in children and adults in everyday situations at daycare centres. Focus of the study is meaning-making as a learning-process and interaction between child and adult. The study examines how meaning is created through shared narratives between adult and child, and what happens and what content is created when child and adult, respectively, initiate a joint narrative.

The dissertation shows that if a daycare centre is perceived as a cultural arena for education and learning, it can be regarded as an arena of contradictions, fractions and negotiations on content. Shared narratives have an unambiguously didactic potential for producing knowledge about what is relevant for the individual child and the expansion of the child's universe Children are drawn into the language and culture when adults use language (conversation) to expand and introduce common narratives with the children. As for didactic relevance for child carers, it is emphasised that they have access to understand what is relevant for the youngest children by being open to the meaning-making function of narratives.

The study is an ethnographic study of perception and relation. The study is based on nine-months of field research in a kindergarten.  The material consists of observations and video footage of storytelling among nine children (seven boys and two girls) and three female employees. The storytelling took place during lunch situations.

Ødegaard, E. E. (2007). Meningsskaping i barnehagen: innhold og bruk av barns og voksnes samtalefortellinger. Göteborg: Acta Universitatis Gothoburgensis.