Mathematics as the Trojan horse in Norwegian early childhood policy?

ABSTRACT

Norwegian early childhood education policy seems to have begun to shift from emphasising playing and the development of the whole child to preparing children for school. This shift has been highlighted by the Norwegian early childhood sector as undesirable “schoolification”. However, mathematics education is rarely mentioned in these discussions and its role has not been previously examined. In this paper, representations of mathematics education in both Norwegian and Organisation of Economic Co-operation and Development policies are explored to determine whether mathematics education is being used as a Trojan horse in subtly shifting early childhood policy towards more teaching and away from playing. Our findings show that mathematics is more strongly linked to teaching and learning than it is to playing but the shift is subtle.

KEYWORDS:

• Norway
• OECD
• early childhood education and care
• policy
• critical discourse analysis

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

ORCID

Tamsin Meaney http://orcid.org/0000-0001-8371-9923

Notes

1. Barnehage (barnehager in plural) is the Norwegian term for institutions providing early childhood education and care (ECEC) for 1–5 year old children. The organisation and naming of ECEC institutions varies significantly across countries, so to maintain the situatedness of the study, we have chosen to use the Norwegian term.

2. Realfag is a Norwegian term that indicates both mathematics and science.

3. Bergem et al. (2014) was published at the end of 2014 and so is outside of the search period. However, its close connection to two other documents about realfag, published only a few months later, led to its inclusion.