”Pedagogers Arbete med Förskolebarns inflytande. En demokratididaktisk studie”.

The overall purpose of this dissertation is to examine child carers’ work on children’s influence. More specifically the dissertation aims to carry out a specific description of how child carers work with children’s influence and, on the basis of this description, analyse and question this work.

The study shows specific examples of how child carers work with children’s influence by letting the children choose activities and take part in the planning of the activities, choose playmates, choose what books to read, influence solutions to problems and conflicts, as well as take responsibility for the physical environment. The author's aim is that the study can encourage discussions at daycare facilities about how to work with children’s influence. The dissertation contributes with insights into how the concept of influence is understood at the daycare facilities, and how this understanding affects the child carers’ work on influence. Influence is understood as a broad term that includes complicity, participation and responsibility. However, the child carers’ work on children’s influence is through a constant balance between freedom and management.

Two departments at one daycare centre were selected for this study as a consequence of the child carers’ interest in working with children’s influence. The author observed the activities at the daycare centre and interviewed child carers before and after the observations regarding their understandings of influence at the daycare centre and to hear their interpretations of the author’s observation notes. The material was analysed on the basis of the central themes and in interaction with critical, relational pedagogy.

Westlund, K. (2011). ”Pedagogers Arbete med Förskolebarns inflytande. En demokratididaktisk studie”. Malmö: Malmö högskola.