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The article is framed by a project designed to study the teacher profession in a current Swedish preschool through work on systematic documentation of quality. Questions deal with how teachers handle the demands on visibility, how they perform and what aspects of the teaching profession will be exposed and what parts will be silenced. This article examines documentation directed towards parents in one public preschool setting over a school year. Apart from weekly parental letters, the data consisted of observations from a staff meeting focusing on teachers' talk while producing the yearly quality account (QA), the content of the final written QA and a follow-up interview. In this case, the requirement of involving the parents in the work on systematic documentation is a traditional but recently clearly expressed policy in the Swedish Education Act. Analysis is based on theories of education policy and how the policy needs to be handled in the local context by the teachers, and theories on the teacher profession and professionalism. The results show that professional strategies like keeping distance vs. keeping closeness are connected to teacher-parent relations such as "trust" and "mate" relations. Teacher-parent relations as "emotional" were found in talks about documentation, and professional strategies to obscure and neutralise were found in relation to the QA.

The article discusses how children make use of their preschool context in order to withdraw. Ethnographic observations were made of two-to five-year-old children's interactions during free play and teacher-led activities in the preschool, and documentation was carried out through field notes and video recordings. The empirical material was analysed using Corsaro's theory on children's peer cultures. Results show that children, in their peer cultures, construct withdrawal strategies - 'making oneself inaccessible' and 'creating and protecting shared hidden spaces' - by making use of the preschool's organization of time and space. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Children’s play is usually connected with qualities such as happiness and innocence, and regarded as important and necessary for learning and development. However, play is not always a state of joy. Experiences of being socially excluded or ignored and of taking part in such activities are occurring. The article draws on a re-analysis of empirical data from a study of pre-school children’s play. The focus in the article is directed towards how pre-school children within the context of play communicate and act in relation to social participation and power. The theoretical framework is built upon a socio-cultural research tradition, particularly emphasising context and communication. Interpretive reproduction, secondary adjustment, and social representations are used as additional theoretical concepts in the analyses and discussions of the results. Empirical data show that children’s social representations of power and participation in play include rationales for who can join the play and who can not, and also how to allow exceptions from the main rule that ‘anyone can join’. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article argues the need to examine communication in joint play situations rather than individual assessments in solitary play situations when children's development is focused. Informed by Bakhtin's dialogical and Moscovici's interactionist perspectives, observations were made of the interaction between two girls, aged 3½ and 4, playing at holding a funeral ceremony, in the setting of a Swedish pre-school. The analysis shows that new knowledge occurred through negotiations of appropriate actions in play. The children's interactions resulted in shared meaning-making of the funeral as a ritual of revival. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]