This presentation highlights children’s social and discursive practice in Swedish leisure-time centres. A leisure-time centre provides activities, before, during and after school, directed to children between six and twelve years old. This institution is closely connected to primary school, staffed with university-educated pedagogues and is, among other things, supposed to contribute to children’s development and to offer a meaningful leisure. Research concerning leisure-time centres is, however, insufficient. How and in what way leisure-time centres really contribute to children’s development is not well studied and what meaningful leisure comprises is not clearly defined in the Swedish curriculum. Knowledge won from research concerning leisure-time pedagogues and children’s construction of meaningful leisure and their everyday lives in the leisure-time centre could contribute to make children’s voice heard, initiate change and to develop the social practice within this institution. This point of departure is closely linked to the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child and the presented study drag attention to children’s opportunities to be active participants in the production of data. Our theoretical point of departure origins from a social constructionist perspective, which emphasizes that reality is constructed by people who interact. Within this theoretical perspective a meaningful leisure in leisure-time centres is mutually constructed by staff and children in their everyday practice. This means that the social practice at leisure-time centres is a consequence of human conceptions and attempts to structure and categorize the activities. The participants, in this case leisure-time pedagogues and children, are producing and reproducing the everyday social practice by mutual negotiations. They learn to handle the activities that are included and settle the meaning of the activities through these interactions. Metods/methodology We use methods that make children’s perspectives visible and reflect the pedagogues’ intentions with their work at two leisure-time centres situated in two different socio-economic areas. The data production consists of narrative interviews, ”walk-and-talk”-conversations and artefacts that contribute to illustrate the social practice. We have stressed the importance of employing a reflexive and dialogical perspective in order to make children’s voices heard as a way to enter into children’s ‘culture of communication’. The participating children received a digital camera and were encouraged to show and take pictures of places they related to, on the basis of questions that gave possibilities to express meanings about their everyday life. The children and the researchers were talking during the walk and after the children’s photographing. The study was carried out in the same way concerning the leisure-time pedagogues although the questions were somewhat different.

Under åren 1991-1992 deltog 77 barn i en förskoleverksamhet som arbetade enligt en fenomenografiskt inspirerad pedagogik vid sex förskolor, med tonvikt lagd på att utveckla barns tänkande och förståelse för olika fenomen omvärlden. När dessa barn slutade i förskolan följdes huvuddelen av dem in skolan genom ett projekt kallat "Att möta skolans värld", finansierat av Skolverket. Syftet med projektet var dels att beskriva och utvärdera barns möte med skolans värld, dels att studera hur barn som gått i en "traditionell", dvs den vanligast förekommande förskoleverksamheten respektive hur barn som deltagit i en fenomenografiskt inspirerad förskoleverksamhet klarar skolan. Barnen har följts genom observationer och intervjuer. I slutet av årskurs 1, årskurs 2 och årskurs 3 har barnen deltagit i ett flertal kunskapsprov. Genom kunskapsproven har man sökt ta reda på hur barnen som deltagit i den försöksverksamheten klarar några ämnen i skolan i jämförelse med sina klasskamrater som fungerar som kontrollgrupp. I detta bidrag kommer resultat från barnens färdigheter inom matematik och skrivning att redovisas och diskuteras. Inom området skrivning uppvisar flickorna bättre resultat än pojkarna både inom försöksgruppen och kontrollgruppen. Samma tendens kan observeras även inom de matematiska färdigheterna även om skillnaderna via en statisktisk prövning visar sig vara relativt små. I provresultaten från kunskapsproven i matematisk problemlösning i årskurs 1 och 2 uppvisar barnen från försöksverksamheten generellt bättre resultat än barnen från kontrollgruppen. I årskurs 3 har denna skillnad ebbat ut.

Resultaten från en ny studie indikerar att det finns en generell delad gemensam diskurs som förenar yrket som fritidspedagog på fritidshem. Fritidspedagogens yrkesroll har under de senaste åren förändras på grund av nya direktiv i policydokument samtidigt som verksamheten lider av neddragna resurser. Fritidspedagoger finner att de är utelämnade till sig själva för att utveckla sin yrkesroll. Syftet i denna undersökning är att studera hur fritidspedagoger konstruerar sin profession.

Studien tar sin utgångspunkt i sociokulturella och dialogiska perspektiv. Analysen utgår från Bakhtins begrepp “authoring”. Bakhtin menar att genom att berätta författar människor sig själva. Datakonstruktionen består av 21 skriftliga berättelser, tio "walk-and-talk" samtal och två fokussamtal med fritidspedagoger.

Children today live in different cultural settings. The pre-school culture is one of them and the media culture outside the pre-school another. These cultures are in different ways characterised by opposite and often even conflicting traditions. This article shows how educators and children handle this dilemma by using interaction as a tool to bring changes into the discourse in an educational setting while making stories in the pre-school by means of the multimedia functions of the computer. The interactional processes from three observations are described. In the discussion a comparison with another study with a constructivist point of departure is made. The comparison between the two studies showed contrasting results. The use of a socio-cultural perspective in the presented project make the context and the community visible, while the other study with its underlying assumptions of individually constructed knowledge make context and community invisible.

In this article two computer-produced multimedia stories created by children in their after-school centre are analysed, building on the assumption that children draw that which is important for them. The aim is to make visible the significance of narrative structure, reaccentuation, intertextuality, multivoicedness and various levels of interpretation. The author discusses how the stories spring from the children’s everyday social practice and mirror their contemporary media culture. In conclusion, the author advances the need for the appropriation of a socially shared symbolic system within the chosen genre through participation in social practices

Gestures are a significant part of communication and carry particular weight when using artefacts such as computers. This study investigates how gestures and utterances are used as resources in the interaction between children and preschool teachers when creating stories with the computer. The data consists of observations of 17 preschool teachers and 34 children who are engaged in making stories. The interaction between the child, the preschool teacher, and the computer has been documented on videotape and analysed by Interaction Analysis. The results show the preschool teachers’ decisive significance as an interplay partner for the child’s appropriation of a linguistic capacity outside of a here-and-now situation.

The main research question in this article is directed to how children use symbols to build up metaphors and through these metaphors express their messages about their culture and everyday life. In the article, I describe how a child, Oskar, takes hold of the power to be the one defining children’s own lives by challenging adult’s prejudices towards children’s computer activities. He does so by making use of metaphors in his digital story. Metaphors are discussed as expressions for discourse and as a way of creating prerequisites of understanding and intersubjectivity. Questions about the making of meaning and identity are also highlighted. Finally, in concert with Mikhail Bakhtin and Paul Ricoeur, the potential of change promoted by understanding and sudden insight as a result of interpretations of metaphors is argued for.

Compared to many other countries in the world school-age educare is widely recognized and valued in Sweden. However, although its widely spreading, knowledge gained from research is scarce. The school-age educare is valuable for children, but as such rather taken for granted. In what way the recent cutbacks of the Swedish school-age educare system have affected the educational standards and equality is not carefully scrutinized. Keeping in mind that extended education is the objective of schoolage educare centres according to the National Curriculum, the question to be asked is why knowledge and evaluations not has been required from politicians and local authorities concerning knowledge directed towards this educational practice. The aim of this paper is to give a background as well as the current status of the Swedish government´s policies on the activity in schoolage educare in Sweden. The empirical material is gained through a document analysis of official documents. The main contribution from the study is to strengthen the field of research, since this field can be considered as new and insufficiently researched. From the expected findings of the analyses of the documents I intend to reflect upon the probable backgrounds to why this field is taken for granted, why it is considered as valuable and possible reasons to why this area not is carefully researched. This research is also intended as a much-needed contribution to the development of this emerging field of research in the Nordic countries. The purpose of the study is to contribute with essential arguments for supporting the development of the school-age educare activities in Sweden, Norway, Denmark, Iceland and Finland.

Projektet STEPS Forskningsprojektet STEPS är sprunget ur en tidigare studie, ”The ICT impact report”, 2006. I denna studie undersöktes pedagogisk verksamhet för elever i de senare åren i skolan. Ett av studiens resultat var att det fanns en kunskapsbrist vad gäller yngre barns lärande med stöd av it. Detta ledde till att Europeiska Kommissionen initierade STEPS-studien. Projektet omfattar 30 länder, 27 länder inom den Europeiska unionen, samt Norge, Lichtenstein och Island. Resultaten från studien är samlade i delrapporter som kan laddas ner från Europiska Kommissionens hemsida: http://eacea.ec.europa.eu/llp/studies/study_impact_technology_primary_school_en.php. För Sveriges del är det intressant att granska och presentera likheter och skillnader i hur it används som pedagogiskt verktyg i verksamheter för yngre barn i vårt land gentemot de övriga 29 länderna i Europa. Projektledningen har i sina rapporter markerat vissa områden där Sverige visar prov på framsynthet, men även områden där Sverige i ett europeiskt perspektiv står still och där svensk verksamhet har potential att utvecklas. Dessa resultat behöver komma till svenska pedagogers kännedom, men kanske framför allt till beslutfattares och skolledares vetskap för att kunna diskuteras och förhoppningsvis leda till förändringar i verksamheten. Intentionen i den svenska rapporten blir därför att granska vår egen verksamhet och förstå vad vi kan utveckla i Sverige genom att inspireras och lära oss av hur andra länder använder it, men även att värdera och tydligt kunna formulera inom vilka områden svensk pedagogisk verksamhet befinner sig i framkant. STEPS projektet bygger på både kvantitativa och kvalitativa data. Under 2006 producerades analyser från enkäter och intervjuer av 30.000 lärare och skolledare i 27 länder. Detta material har uppdaterats genom kvalitativa delar genomförda i tre steg. Följande material har lämnats in till STEPS projektledning från alla de medverkande länderna: • Nationell landsöversikt • Review av fyra forskningsstudier som speglar teknologi i förskola, förskoleklass, fritidshem och skolans tidigare år • Skolbeskrivningar samt fallstudier av praktiker för att hämta illustrativa exempel För att komma svenska läsare tillgodo har det europiska materialet bearbetats och ett urval har gjorts med avseende på att intressera svenska läsare. Genom Skolverkets försorg har webbsidor utformats där de svenska beskrivningarna av fallstudierna illustrerade med videoklipp och stillbilder finns publicerade. I projektet gjordes en översikt för varje land och här presenteras den svenska landsöversikten. I den kan vi alltså läsa om vårt eget land i en direkt jämförelse med de andra länderna i Europa. Den svenska delen av studien har finansierats av Skolverket.

This study aims to construct knowledge about how teachers in Swedish school-age educare centres build on their professional identity by listening to their narratives about their work, their interpretations of their mission and how they apply their intentions. The study takes its point of departure from sociocultural (Vygotsky, 1978) and dialogical (Bakhtin, 1986) perspectives. The analysis starts with Bakhtin’s notion of authoring. The construction of data was carried out in three steps. Firstly, by collecting written narratives from 21 teachers, secondly by oral narratives from ten teachers among the 21 teachers participating in ‘walk-and-talk’ conversations and finally from a commonly created conversation in two focus interviews with eight of the teachers. The results from this study indicate that there is a commonly shared general discourse unifying the professional identity of the teacher in school-age educare centres.