”En förändrad yrkesidentitet. Förskollärares berättelser fyra och tolv år efter examen”.

The purpose of this study is to examine Swedish child carers’ professional development and professional identities. The study aims to examine how child carer’s professional identities change over eight years; from four years to twelve years after qualifying as child carers.

In the study, three recurring themes were identified in the narratives, which indicate a change in the child carers’ professional identities. One theme was that the child carers go from adapting to the prevailing culture of the daycare centres to challenging the culture. The second theme regards a change in the child carers’ view of care and learning, in which 12 years after completing their study programme, child carers focus more on children’s learning than they did eight years earlier. The third theme is that child carers go from one view of the child, with focus on listening to and understanding the child, to another view of the child, with focus on challenging the child. This is interpreted by the author as that these changes can not only be seen as a result of a changed rhetoric about the daycare centre, but should also be seen in the light of a change in the professional development of the three child carers interviewed.

Data material consists of 15 child carers’ narratives about their professional development, four years after qualifying as child carers. Three of the 15 child carers were interviewed again eight years later. The interviews were recorded and later transcribed. In the analysis, changes in the narratives were considered as an expression of a changed professional identity.

Hensvold, I.E. (2011). ”En förändrad yrkesidentitet. Förskollärares berättelser fyra och tolv år efter examen”. Nordisk Barnehageforskning, 4(1), 1-16.