Preschool teachers as keepers of traditions and agents of change

According to the curriculum for Swedish kindergartens, one of the tasks of kindergartens is to pass on a cultural heritage, with its values, traditions and history, language and knowledge, from one generation to the next. This formulation indicates that cultural heritage plays an important role in defining the work of kindergarten teachers when it comes to passing on cultural norms to children.

The primary aim of this study was to investigate how Swedish kindergarten teachers work with and reflect on the task of passing on a cultural heritage. The article focuses on Easter celebrations in two Swedish kindergartens. More specifically, the authors are interested in how kindergarten teachers manoeuvre the task of passing on Easter traditions that have both religious and secular roots.

The different ways of staging traditions are used as tools to socialise children into a cultural heritage, at the same time as they become a means of implementing kindergarten pedagogy. Kindergarten teachers can act as agents of change, challenging some of the ways in which we celebrate a tradition, but at the same time they act as agents of national reproduction. Therefore, kindergarten teachers carry out the curriculum objectives while also introducing several different elements, where some represent continuity while others represent change.

The empirical data consists of 227 minutes of video observations from two Swedish kindergartens. The data was analysed using a qualitative content analysis that focused on how different semiotic resources, actions and objects are used to stage Easter.     

Puskás, T. & Andersson, A. (2018). “Preschool teachers as keepers of traditions and agents of change”. Early Years, 41(2-3):190–201.