Den här artikelns fokusområde placeras i forskningssamtalet om hur undervisning kan förstås i förskolans praktik. Mer precist undersöks kopplingen mellan förskollärares reflektioner om sin undervisning och förskolans kultur med stöd av forskningsfrågan Hur beskrivs och arrangeras undervisning i den här förskolan? Studiens deltagare representerar två arbetslag på en förskola som beskriver sig arbeta utifrån välkomnandets och lyssnandets pedagogik. Empirin består av material från ett reflektionssamtal utifrån dokumentationer som förskollärarna menar berört dem eller haft betydelse för undervisning i ett pedagogiskt hållbarhetsprojekt med fokus på växtrötter och teckenskapande. Utformningen och analysen av reflektionssamtalet utgick från kommunikation ur kulturellt förhållningssätt (Carey, 1992; Dewey, 1916) och en förståelse för förskolor som idiokulturer (Fine, 1979, 2012). Analysen resulterade i tre områden: Undervisningsprocesser i rörelse, Förskollärarnas deltagande och närvaro och Urskiljande av kunskapsområden genom lyssnande. Resultatet diskuteras genom förskolans undervisningskultur, hur läroplanen visar sig i barns göranden och undervisningens relationer. 

Teaching as listening in preschool

In this article we focus on the ongoing research discussion concerning how the concept of teaching can be understood in preschool practice. In particular, we examine the connection between preschool teachers’ reflections on their own teaching and the culture of the preschool in which they work. This study is guided by the research question: How is teaching described and arranged for in the teachers’ preschool? The seven participating preschool teachers were drawn from two departmental teams that described themselves as working from a Pedagogy of Welcoming and Listening. The empirical materials are drawn from reflection conversations held with the preschool teachers in which the teachers discussed documentation they considered personally significant for their teaching in a recent education for sustainability project focused on play roots and semiotic production. The design and analysis of these conversations was based on cultural theories of communication (Carey, 1992; Dewey, 1916), and an understanding of preschool education as a situated cultural development process, preschools as idiocultures (Fine, 1979, 2012). Our analysis led to the description of three perspectives representative of the preschool teachers’ meaning-making in relation to teaching: Teaching processes in motion, Preschool teachers’ participation and presence, and Discernment of knowledge domains by listening to children’s actions. The result is discussed in terms of the preschool’s teaching culture, the ways in which the national preschool curriculum is manifest in the children’s actions, and the social and material relationships underpinning teaching. 

In UNESCO's recent publication Education for Sustainable Development: A Roadmap the idea of community is described as playing an important role in the organization of education for sustainable development as a means of supporting transformations towards sustainability. In the present study we examine the relationship between community and the organization of Early Childhood Education and Care for Sustainability (ECECfS). This examination is based on case studies of Swedish preschool teachers' perspectives and practices in relation to ECECfS. Drawing on Cultural Historical Activity Theory and the concept of ontological Communities of Learners, we describe ways in which community-based characteristics of the preschools shape and are shaped by cultural tools used to pursue ECECfS. Themed-Project Work (TPW), a common means in Swedish preschools of organizing day-today activities, emerged as an important practice through which to examine questions of community within and across preschools. We describe organizational tensions concerning how pedagogical practices like TPW change from being tools to support a preschool's activities, to being objects toward which these activities are oriented. Such changes can enable or constrain a preschool's possibilities for building pluralistic and democratic ECEC environments. We also discuss how the said organizational tensions are rooted in how community is conceived of in preschool provision. Community is constituted not only through the relationships among members of individual preschools but also through the relationships that preschools have with other preschools in their administrative networks. We discuss contradictions that emerge in this matrix of relationships that shape how preschools enact good governance in the pursuit of ECECfS.

The research presented in this paper explores how preschool teachers in Sweden negotiate tensions stemming from perceived cultural dilemmas among themselves, the children they work with, and the children´s parents or guardians. The aim in characterising this process of negotiation is to expand knowledge about how to adapt pedagogically to the increasing diversity of the preschool sector in Sweden. The study is based on focus group interviews with preschool teachers who work in schools where nearly 70% of the children are newly arrived immigrants or have parents or guardians who were born in a country other than Sweden. The interview data were subjected to a thematic analysis. Three themes emerged: Circumventing conflicts by keeping preschool peaceful; Culture as a barrier and opportunity for dealing with dilemmas; and engaging with conflicts as a means of developing the preschool profession. The themes are discussed in relation to Gert Biesta’s concepts of the rational community and the community of those who have nothing in common.

Swedish preschool pedagogues have recently been coping with increased expectations to engage in “adult-led, goal oriented” teaching, and work with sustainability-related issues. In Swedish preschool provision, teaching and sustainability are contested concepts that embody pedagogical tensions (e.g. teaching as a school-like vs. a holistic activity; sustainability as an environmental and/or social concern). Some pedagogues have thus responded with ambivalence to this teaching/sustainability assignment. The present study explores how Swedish preschool pedagogues, experienced in Early Childhood Education and Care for Sustainability (ECECfS) research and practice, engage in teaching. Qualitative case studies were conducted of teacher teams from three preschools. The teams participated in a series of government-sponsored workshops for designing outdoor spaces in preschools as sustainable, multifunctional environments. Case studies were based on group interviews, surveys, and field observations. Drawing on concepts from cultural-historical activity theory, thematic analyses were conducted to characterize practitioner conceptions and practices of ECECfS and teaching in preschool. The study met all criteria for ethical conduct. Teachers described ECECfS in terms of what is learned and how. What: environmental knowledge; attitudes, feelings toward the environment, and toward others; self-confidence. How: arrangements for time “in nature”; systematic observation; pretend play; themed project work. Pedagogical tensions were identified which linked these descriptions thematically: ECECfS as teaching content vs. “teaching” values; approach vs. sensitivity to the environment; ECECfS as environmentally vs. socially focused. Implications are discussed for developing pedagogies that advance the ECECfS ethos of adult-child coparticipation in and co-determination of preschool activities. 

Inclusion, a basic principle of equal education set by The UNESCO Salamanca Statement in 1994, can be seen as an only rarely realized utopia. The principle that no child should be excluded from any early childhood classroom activity (V. Paley in Armstrong & Dawson, 2004), is often considered by teachers to be difficult or even impossible to achieve in today’s early childhood and childhood classrooms. In this paper we examine adult-child joint play spaces called “playworlds” (Lindqvist, 1995; authors et al., 2011) as potentially inclusive spaces in the field of education. Playworlds are adult-child joint play activities in which children and teachers create, enter and exit fantasy worlds.  We argue that playworlds can be thought of as 'real utopias' (Wright, 2010; Brown & Cole, 2001) that aim to develop inclusive practices and communities within an institution (preschool or school) that in most cases relies on exclusive practices. We investigate, with two case studies, one from U.S. early childhood elementary school classroom and one from Finnish childhood elementary school classroom, how two playworlds functioned as radically inclusive settings, seemingly bypassing institutional even physical barriers to inclusivity through the logic of play. We discuss the potentials and challenges of creating these "as if" imaginative worlds that are located within regulated and controlled institutions such as schools (other & author, 2019). We also examine doing educational research through playworlds as a utopian methodology (Brown & Cole, 2001): What is required of researchers in supporting these alternative spaces?

One of the productive challenges of working in early childhood education and care is combining researchers’ and teachers’ knowledge and ways of knowing. This chapter presents findings from studies that combine researchers’ perspectives and teacher’s insights. We suggest that a certain type of adult–child joint play, called playworld, (Lindqvist, 1995), can be a means for preschool teachers to bring their personal selves, not just their professional, teacher selves, into their work with young children (Ferholt & Schuck, forthcoming; Nilsson et al., 2018). We begin from a relational pedagogical perspective (Aspelin & Persson, 2011) where concepts of co-existence and co-operation are central. This conceptual framework is applied in a case study using observations from a two-year ethnographic investigation of three Swedish preschool teachers implementing playworld pedagogy for the first time. Their work was influenced by a pedagogy of listening and exploratory learning, originating from the municipal preschools of Reggio Emilia.

A core value underpinning activities in early childhood education and care for sustainability (ECECfS) is that these activities be organized to support forms of democratic, intergenerational collaboration in which children can act as “agents of change.” From the perspective of mediational theories of mind, the possibilities for children to participate actively and agentively in ECECfS can be understood by studying the ECEC settings in which these activities unfold as systems of culturally-constituted and historically contingent conditions.

The present study applied this perspective in qualitative case studies of how teachers in three Swedish preschools understand and practice ECECfS, and the degree to which children in these preschools could act as agents of change in relation to ECECfS activities. This research is based on survey and interview data collected from teacher teams in preschools that participated in a series of regional government-sponsored workshops designed to support teachers’ efforts to develop the outdoor spaces in their preschools as sustainable, multifunctional environments. Drawing on concepts from cultural historical activity theory (systemic tensions as underpinning expansive learning), surveys and interview transcripts were analyzed to characterize: how the participating teachers engaged with concepts relevant for understanding their approach to ECECfS (sustainability, teaching, pretend and exploratory play); pedagogical and organizational tensions that teachers described in relation to these concepts; and cultural means that mediated teachers relations to the general object of implementing ECECfS.

Teachers conceptions and practices of ECECfS were in general consistent with findings of prior research of in-service and pre-service preschool staff in Sweden: While teachers understood ECECfS holistically as a project that integrates environmental, economic, and social dimensions, the majority of the activities organized by the teachers emphasized the environmental dimension, with none explicitly emphasizing the economic dimension. Furthermore, teachers in all three schools described their day-to-day preschool practices as inherently about and for sustainability, noting a kind of tension or contradiction with needing to make sustainability explicit in preschool activities.

With respect to opportunities for children to act as agents of change in day-to-day preschool activities, we found examples in all three cases in which children engaged in actions that changed their material environment and/or their participation in relevant community(ies) of practice. Critically, what varied across preschools was if and to what degree these actions were clearly motivated by children’s questions, interests, and/or intentions. We draw on the concepts of instrumental and ontological communities of learners (Matusov et al., 2013) to argue that pedagogical and organizational aspects of each preschool’s idioculture (Fine, 2012) enabled or constrained the possibilities for children to act as agents of change.