This article is based on an ethnographic study of children’s everyday life in Swedish preschools. The ethnography is used to explore children’s strategies for influencing, defending and constructing the social order of a preschool institution. The focus of our concern is on how the children, in their interactions with each other and with the preschool teachers, manage the collective regulation and how they negotiate their participation in collective activities. There is an inherent tension between free play and the high degree of routinised and collective activities within the preschool institution. The study shows that children are active in playing at the border, acting as if the institution is the children’s place. It also shows how they draw on different strategies as resources for managing the regulations, accounting for personal autonomy and negotiating the social order. In taking a child perspective and acknowledging children as active agents, it is possible to see how they influence and shape their everyday life in a preschool context. In addition, the article illustrates individual children’s strategic and pragmatic use of resources and in doing so contribute to their own childhood and thereby become part of a social and cultural construction process.
The aim of the article is to shed light on children's views of the different forms of documentation that are related to and used in the interaction between home and school. The study draws on qualitative interviews with 52 pupils aged 12-13 years in Year 6 in Sweden. The analyses reveal how documentation and documents are created and understood from the pupils' perspectives. The pupils point to how documentation form an important part of the communication between home and school and how documents are produced, communicated and consumed by the different actors and their own role.
This article explores the construction of parent—teacher conferences in the Swedish preschool and focuses on processes that construct and maintain these meetings. The analysis draws upon an ethnographic study in two preschools and the empirical material consists of 11 audiotaped parent—teacher conferences and observations of everyday activities related to them. By using empirical data from a wider context than the specific speech event, it is possible to gain knowledge about the complexity of the construction of parent—teacher conferences. Using the concept of a ‘pocket of local order’, it is argued that parent—teacher conferences are practices which consist of a large number of activities linked to resources and restrictions that can be interpreted as an imperative to the participants to conduct talks in preschool and at home, to fill in forms and then use these activities in the conference. In addition, parents and teachers, as well as children, contribute to the construction and maintenance of the pocket of local order, i.e. activities that can be interpreted as an imperative to the actors to reach institutional goals.
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