Preschool’s new suit: care in terms of learning and knowledge

Abstract

This article focuses on aspects of the notion of care in relation to the work of quality documentation in the Swedish preschool. Questions deal with how teachers enact pedagogy in relation to the documentation work; how they handle the demands of visibility; and which aspects of the teacher profession are exposed and which are silenced. Data consist of observations from staff meetings at a preschool and interviews with preschool teachers and their managers while discussing the work of documenting quality in the preschool. Our analytical tools are based on theories of teacher professionalism, combined with education policy. Our results show that the preschool staff rarely talk about care and that difficulty in describing and documenting the meaning of care leads them to use various professional strategies whereby they escape the challenges and transform care into children’s learning and knowledge.

Keywords:

• care
• quality documentation
• professional strategies

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Swedish Research Council [2011: 5056].