With focus on teachers' experiences and understandings of manual-based programmes, this article explores the implications for teacher professionalism. It locates teachers' use of manual-based programmes in the intersection of two currents of ideas in contemporary society and within education: therapy culture and the evidence movement. The article…

According to the national framing of the Swedish preschool system, educators are expected to act as mediators of the dominant language while simultaneously promoting multilingualism. Previous research shows that educators display an insecurity as well as a lack of knowledge of how to implement this dual undertaking. This article examines…

The Swedish preschool is an important socializing agent because the great majority of children aged, from 1 to 5 years, are enrolled in an early childhood education program. This paper explores how preschool teachers and children, in an ethnically diverse preschool, negotiate the meaning of cultural traditions celebrated in Swedish preschools.…

This study explores preschool children's mathematizing in everyday block play activities. Building on an ethnomethodological and multimodal conversation analytic framework, we explore how geometry (i.e. spatiality, shape, and symmetry) is actualized in children's verbal and embodied interaction with their peers, pedagogues, and material…

In this article, the authors problematize the dichotomization of play and learning that often shapes the agenda of early childhood education research and practice. This dichotomization is driven in part by the tendency to define learning in terms of formal learning (i.e. learning as an outcome of direct instruction and school-based approaches that…

Citizens of modern societies must trust a broad range of systems and professionals. When distrust arises, professionals are expected to be accountable. This paper draws on conversational material from a preschool team meeting. When a preschool work team prepares to meet a parent who has complained about their recurring neglect to change her…

Introduction: This paper reports results from an ethnographic study of teacher trainees' information activities in digital, group-based learning and their relation to the interplay between use and appropriation of digital tools and the learning environment. Method: The participants in the present study are 249 pre-school teacher trainees in…

This article is from a study about the integration of refugee children (aged one to five) and their families in Sweden. Refugee children and parents who have received a residence permit are entitled to be introduced into the Swedish society. One of the first encounters refugee children and families have with Swedish society is with the preschool.…

This paper presents different angles on the subject of digital play as a means to develop children's literacy and power, using an online ethnographical study of Swedish preschool teachers' discussions in informal online forums. Question posts (n = 239) were analysed using the Technological Pedagogical Knowledge framework and the Caring, Nurturing…

In this video ethnographic study, a social semiotic approach has been used to explore how the use of digital tablets in preschools may enable children's communication in a minority language. The results show how preschool children use the emerging affordances of digital tablets in order to act as producers of minority language activities, where…

In this study we argue that a focus on language learning ecologies, that is, situations for participation in various communicative practices, can shed light on the intricate processes through which minority children develop or are constrained from acquiring cultural and linguistic competencies (here, of a majority language). The analysis draws on…

This paper examines the strategies monolingual teachers use to scaffold meaning and encourage and enhance verbal communication with emergent bilingual children in a Swedish mainstream preschool. The study is based on ethnographic fieldwork in a preschool group in which seven of twelve children spoke Swedish as their second, additional language.…

In early childhood education, children's daily practice revolves to a great extent around order and discipline. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork from a Swedish preschool class, the present study further explores how the task of being a teacher's assistant can be critically understood in terms of how gender, discipline and order are expressed in…

This paper presents results from an ethnographic study of language policy as it is enacted in everyday interaction in two language profile preschools in Sweden with explicit monolingual language policies: English and Finnish, respectively. However, in both preschools, children are free to choose language or code alternate. The study shows how…

This article explores dilemmatic aspects of language policies in a preschool group in which three languages (Swedish, Romani and Arabic) are spoken on an everyday basis. The article highlights the interplay between policy decisions on the societal level, the teachers' interpretations of these policies, as well as language practices on the micro…