Bland dokumentationer, reflektioner och teoretiska visioner: idéer och diskurser om hur barn skapar mening i förskolan.

The question of how children create meaning across the physical, social and cultural realities of which they are part has often been addressed at traditional preschools as well as Reggio Emilia-inspired preschools in Sweden. At preschools founded on the Reggio Emilia philosophy in particular, pedagogical documentation is considered an essential tool for demonstrating children’s development and learning processes. The purpose of this study is to examine how children’s meaning-making is articulated by leaders and teachers in a Swedish preschool, which - by virtue of its Reggio Emilia pedagogical approach - has special focus on pedagogical documentation.

Based on analyses in the study, the researcher concludes that the preschool area is characterised by discourses with different and conflicting rationales, and this creates dilemmas in the preschool teachers’ documentation work. An example of this is the gap between political documentation requirements and the local curriculum that the preschool teachers are expected to comply with.

The analyses in the study suggest that preschool teachers’ discussions about children’s meaning-making processes give rise to discursive diversity. During the teachers’ conversations, ideas and discourses collide, intertwine and are renegotiated, which reflects the potentially diverging perspectives on children’s meaning-making. Despite the diverging and conflicting descriptions of the children, the researcher identifies a dominant and overarching discourse, which depicts the children as individual meaning-makers with a manifest ability to construct and assess knowledge through active and sensory interactions with their surroundings.

Based on an ethnographic research design, the researcher made observations and conducted interviews in a Reggio Emilia-inspired preschool (förskola) in Southern Sweden. The primary empirical data consists of observations of a group of preschool teachers (six teachers (pedagoger) and two ECEC supervisors (pedagogiska handledare)) who held 11 planning and reflection meetings in the course of one year. At these meetings, the preschool teachers discussed different issues and challenges related to their ongoing documentation of the children’s interactions while engaged in preschool activities. The empirical basis from the eight informants consisted of field notes and sound recordings.

Lindgren, T. (2015). Bland dokumentationer, reflektioner och teoretiska visioner: idéer och diskurser om hur barn skapar mening i förskolan. Malmö Studies in Educational Sciences: Licentiate Dissertation Series 2015:37. Malmö högskola, Fakulteten för lärande och samhälle.