Early intervention and integration are highly valued ideals in kindergartens in Norway. Building on two research projects informed by institutional ethnography, the authors address how kindergarten teachers 'do' early intervention and integration in their everyday work. They argue that this work largely revolves around managing categories, whether…

In Norway's 'Framework Plan for kindergartens' digital tools are to be implemented for learning, play and creativity. Implicitly the concept of digital tools, or ICTs, tend to be tablets, computers, and interactive whiteboards, smartphones are as such not taken into account. However, we find that the smartphone is particularly interesting because…

This article seeks to look below the surface of pedagogical documentation with a temporal lens. We focus on the potentialities of pedagogical documentation as an intertwined research process with children and teachers as learners in 'slow pedagogies' (Clark [2020]. "Towards a Listening ECEC System: Valuing Slow Pedagogy and Slow…

This research explores how the material environment in kindergarten frames social practices and everyday life and how change may affect pedagogy. Data were drawn from an ethnographic study conducted in a large, newly established kindergarten in Norway. The analyses focus on one conversation between two educators and the head of the kindergarten.…

Care is traditionally researched in ECEC as a dyadic, human phenomenon that relies heavily of tropes of females as care providers. The assumption that care is produced in dyadic relationships occludes material care practices that occur beyond the dyad. Drawing on Bernice Fisher and Joan Tronto's care ethics and Karen Barad's focus on the agency of…

This partly descriptive, partly critically reflective, argumentative article analyses the Norwegian kindergarten teacher education program through the three concepts that are mentioned in its national guidelines: research-based, profession-oriented, and practice-related education. An inseparable correlation between these at the level of higher…

This study examined whether Norwegian children who were referred to The School Psychology Services (SPS) for either language difficulties or social difficulties at kindergarten age demonstrated co-existing weak skills in the other area at 33 months and whether some of them could have been identified and referred earlier. Forty-three children…

Regulation of time is an important structuring tool of everyday practices in kindergarten. Despite the fundamental importance, investigation of temporal patterns have been underestimated in early childhood education research. The purpose of this article is to illuminate how ideas of childhood and children's cultural formation are embedded in the…

This article is crafted through three scenes, through which the author tries to imagine quality as something that is third space, semiotic, plasticity, eternal, and simultaneously something solid and obviously good here and now, through a Spinozian/Deluzian/Braitottian joy/you/me. The author rhizomatically tries to lay everything out on a plane of…

This article explores the use of poetic inquiry in a transnational competence-building Shadow Play Project. Based on journals from four Nepalese preschool teacher educators, I present and interpret examples of data poems that portray the teachers' experiences of ownership in the project. My discussion intends to make explicit some aspects of the…

In this paper, we contrast the early childhood education and care aims and curriculum in Norway and Australia and the theoretical underpinnings of Norwegian and Australian pedagogy in an attempt to partially explain the different approaches to (risky) outdoor play in these two countries. We argue that Norwegian pedagogical approaches may allow…

The aim of the study was to examine teachers' didactic projects in connection with constructing co-narratives with very young children during mealtimes. As a genre, co-narrative practice has a special quality for didactic work with children from one to three years old. Yet it is not always common in preschools for the teachers to talk to children…

This paper examines the content and teaching methods in a 4-year decentralized preschool teacher education program using a combination of direct and distance learning at Stavanger College in Norway. The content of preschool education and the knowledge skills, communication skills, and the general professional competencies required for professional…