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- Wahlgren, Catarina, 1967-
(författare)
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En bild säger mer än tusen ord : Barns perspektiv, positioner och påverkansmöjligheter i förskolans dokumentationspraktik
- 2023
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Doktorsavhandling (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- The overall aim of this thesis is to examine children's perspectives, positions and possibilities for participation in Swedish preschool documentation practice. The empirical data consists of 1575 photographs from six preschool classes located in different suburban areas. The thesis includes four articles that examine different aspects of the practice of pedagogical documentation. In the first article the children's own stories about the photographs are analysed. In the second article, notions of the child from photographs presented on the preschool walls and from the Swedish Curriculum for the Preschool are compared. The third article examines the content and circulation of digital photographs. Finally, the fourth article explores how children are portrayed in photographs of outdoor activities. All articles are grounded in theories about power and knowledge production, such as discourse theory, and discuss intersections between age, gender, ethnicity and class.The results show that children are capable of creating their own stories in interaction with photographs. However, their stories tend to be gender specific although the photographs mediate gender neutrality. The children mainly described their mutual relationships and, to a lesser extent, the displayed activities. The photographs align with trends of schoolification and masculine-coded production and accomplishment, while care and play are made invisible in the photographs. However, the outdoor photographs, stand out in the sample as they make children visible as sensitive and closely attached to nature. Unlike indoors photographs, outdoor photographs visibilized feminine-coded values as desirable. Outdoor and digitally circulated photographs often displayed children as anonymous, and as neutral in terms of gender and ethnicity. This could be positive since children were able to include themselves in activities represented in the photographs. At the same time, the photographs became impersonal and sometimes insipid; as the anonymisation made children's experiences and knowledge production invisible.The thesis concludes that notions of the child, communicated in preschool photographs, are conform and make competence appear as production and accomplishment, while alternative ways of being a preschool child are made invisible. Therefore, a feminist definition of professionalisation is suggested in order to increase children's participation and incorporate alternative stories in preschool knowledge production, which, in turn, can challenge the notion of the competent child.
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