Search

This study deals with all children’s possibilities of meeting the multilingual society and aims to explore the norms regarding language and culture that are reflected in picturebooks in preschools. Previous research has shown how picturebooks can be used to develop literacy skills and intercultural understandings among children. A postcolonial lens is used to identify social locations and thereby unfold hidden power relations and social positionings of who is to be included and who is not (Spivak, 1988; Yuval-Davis, 2006). 35 picturebooks collected from preschools in Iceland, Norway and Sweden have been analysed by frequency and qualitative content analysis, eleven of which were found to contain multilingualism and/or multiculturalism. The results show a) a prevailing monolingual norm in which solely artefacts carry multilingual trails; b) a strong monocultural norm, which places people of diversity in a marginalised position; c) the English language holds an advanced position compared to majority languages, which situates other minority languages as anomalous. The educational significance of the research implicates a need for multilingual and multicultural diversity to be more observable in picturebooks used in preschool, to help children develop languages, and their own linguistic and cultural identity/-ies and, thus, their sense of belonging to a multilingual society.

ABSTRACTThis article is an empirically grounded contribution to the understanding of how digitalization in education is interpreted and made into being by actors in everyday lives, in this case children and teachers in Swedish early childhood education. The focus is on interactions in an early childhood classroom upon and around a digital interactive floor setting. Drawing on the theoretical concept of socio-spatiality, this literacy event is understood as an enactment of policy where both teacher and children become actors and subjects. Using observations and video recordings as a methodological approach, the study shows how the literacy event in the digital setting is enacted and constituted as a relational process between literacy desirings and education policy regarding digitalization. The authors suggest that engaging with both children’s processes of literacy desirings and educational commands in ECE digital activities serves as a productive way to investigate how digitalization is enacted in contemporary ECE.

This study describes and critically discusses a development project designed to create and enact a local language policy at a Swedish multilingual school, its context, content and implementation dimensions. The collaborative construction of a school language policy is a complex process, with tensions that need to be resolved. By describing the processes involved in the language policy project we examine the factors that facilitated and obstructed the enactment of the language policy. The data include 25 interviews with school headteachers and staff members, 15 observations of teachers and school-age educare teachers, field notes, and audio recordings of research circles. Drawing on insights from the enactment framework, the analysis reveals three important themes with respect to the enactment processes: continuity, cohesion, and inclusion. Factors such as communication and leadership, but also external factors, were found to influence outcomes of the project, illuminating an interwoven web of contexts and facets for understanding the enactment of the language policy. These factors influencing outcomes of the project will be discussed in the light of implications for the enactment of the school language policy project.

This article analyses the knowledge about linguistic and cultural diversity that is delineated in the syllabi of teacher education programmes for pre-, primary and secondary schools at two Swedish universities. A quantitative search for 14 chosen keywords preceded a closer analysis of the concepts *language* and *cultur*, when using truncation, in 192 syllabi. This showed that linguistic diversity was to a certain extent evident, mainly through the subjects Swedish and English, while for one university cultural diversity was mainly identified in the syllabi of Educational Work and English. If knowledge about linguistic and cultural diversity is limited to language subjects, and to some extent to pre-school and earlier school years, the risk is high that student teachers are not prepared to support equity in education for multilingual and non-dominant groups. Thus, we find that students studying the current Swedish teacher education programme are unlikely to be well equipped to meet the challenges related to creating equal educational opportunities for students in situations of linguistic and cultural diversity.

This article is based on observations made in a Swedish digital early childhood classroom during reading time. The question of ‘what is happening’ in the digital classroom when six-year-olds read a fictional electronic book is explored through video observations focusing on children learning to read by engaging in e-books. Informed by affect, as described by Baruch de Spinoza and interpreted by Gilles Deleuze, this article provides a way to attend to the highly dynamic encounters between bodies, ideas and materiality that characterize the children's engagement in e-reading. The analysis suggests that the digital voice is a vital component for activating engagement in and a drive for reading through the moments and movements of embodied reading when children co-read a fictional e-book on their own. Focusing on how e-book reading is enacted in the educational everyday reading practices, this article is an empirically grounded contribution to the understanding of how e-reading is constituted in contemporary digital classroom in all its complexity.

This article describes how the process of writing a fictional narrative, “My Story”, transforms and emerges over a period of five days in a Swedish early childhood classroom. Our purpose is to explore and describe how this method-driven writing project emerge in relation to material and discursive conditions, and to provide an empirically based understanding of the forces, flows and processes at work. This entails understanding processes of writing as an effect of complex relationships between the individual (the teacher and the student), the learning outcome, the affect, the talk, the motion, the body and the material. The results show how the writing project on some occasions come to a stop, sometimes take new directions or activate unforeseen affects and open for new becomings. The article also discusses how methods on the one hand has an explicit and formalized side, possible to articulate and predict. But on the other hand, is embedded in and driven by affects that changes both the method, the text production and the writing-learning subject. The article ends with a discussion of implications and possibilities understanding teaching methods of writing as dynamic processes that continually open for a variety of assemblages, flows and forces

This article uses a discursive lens to illuminate how writing and the writing child is constructed in different texts since the nineteenth century. The concept ‘image’ is used as an analytical tool to gain perspective on dominant ideas about children as writers and their educational writing practices. These images are produced in educational practices, theories of writing, societal conceptions and didactic models, which together are referred to as a formation. The article ends by reflecting upon what consequences may be seen if taking a critical child perspective. The article provides an analysis against which writing teachers, teacher educators and researchers can gain a perspective on dominant ideas about young writers and their educational writing practices.Abstract: This article uses a discursive lens to illuminate how writing and the writing child is constructed in different texts since the nineteenth century. The concept 'image' is used as an analytical tool to gain perspective on dominant ideas about children as writers and their educational writing practices. These images are produced in educational practices, theories of writing, societal conceptions and didactic models, which together are referred to as a formation. The article ends by reflecting upon what consequences may be seen if taking a critical child perspective. The article provides an analysis against which writing teachers, teacher educators and researchers can gain a perspective on dominant ideas about young writers and their educational writing practices.