Att göra sig gällande. Mångfald i förskolebarns kamratkulturer.

The purpose of this study is to describe, analyse and understand how children at daycare facilities construct cultural diversity in their interaction with one another.

The study shows that children play an active role in the construction of cultural diversity within “friendship cultures”. This is evident in situations in which the children ”display their gender”, show their skills and use their creativity to vary and develop their play. However, the children have different opportunities to use their cultural backgrounds as a resource in their friendship culture. On the one hand, the results show a diversity in friendship cultures with regard to e.g. gender and skills. On the other hand, the study shows that the children’s actions within friendship cultures include power games and inclusion as well as exclusion. In other words, the results show that the children start on the basis of different social positions, status positions, and communication strategies. The children do not necessarily position themselves on the basis of age, and other characteristics may be important as well. Moreover, the study shows that hierarchy in groups of children entails that children have different possibilities for getting their ideas and views heard. These hierarchies are strong in the processes which determine which of the children’s cultural impulses, i.e. the children’s individual backgrounds, will be part of the children’s play, and which will be rejected. In other words, the study shows that the children’s possibilities for contributing their experiences to play are promoted in some situations, whereas other situations are restrictive. Furthermore, the author observes a clear power asymmetry between children and early childhood educators; an asymmetry which, among other things, is expressed in different forms of adult control. The author also observes that the degree of adult control affects children’s possibilities for developing their play. On the basis of the results of the study the author therefore concludes that the children’s construction of cultural diversity in the friendship culture at the daycare centre becomes a question of being able to make yourself relevant.

The data material is based on field work in three Swedish daycare centres in which children’s interaction with one another has been observed. The material consists of a total of 48 days of observations and conversations with 63 children aged one to six years. The observations were carried out as participating observation and registered as field notes, video footage as well as sound recordings.

Olausson, A. (2012). Att göra sig gällande. Mångfald i förskolebarns kamratkulturer. Ph.d.-afhandling. Umeå universitet, Institutionen för tillämpad utbildningsvetenskap.