This essay is a discourse analysis of preschool teachers' speeches about children's influence in connection with planned teaching opportunities. We chose to focus on the form of teaching that educators call ”project work” because we see that teaching is largely conducted through this form. To investigate the overall theme, we have also chosen to focus on the influence of younger children in relation to teaching with a project work form. The purpose of this study is to examine how preschool teachers talk about the importance of the balance between teaching and children's influence at a younger age. This study is based on structured interviews with preschool teachers. We have chosen to use discourse analysis that also adheres to the French philosopher, Foucault's theory of power and control, which we believe the preschool teacher can have towards children in planned teaching sessions. The result shows that preschool teachers believe that children's influence is an important aspect of teaching. According to them, you can get children's influence in project work by planning project work based on children's interest, but that it is a challenge as not all children share the same interest. It was also found in the study that the younger children cannot have the same influence because they lack the verbal language and one must therefore be able to interpret their body language. It was also revealed in our study that stronger individuals often take over project work, which may also be due to, among other things, the verbal language. To get all the children to the teaching opportunities, the preschool teachers use the method of attracting to create an interest in the children in project work. Based on a discourse analysis, we have been able to see in this study the concepts and discursive structures that express and motivate how children's influence is limited. In other words, we see the motivations and ways of talking about the attraction and lack of verbal language of the youngest that the preschool teachers use, which in practice characterize how their exercise of power is expressed. Even in children's environment, we have been able to see that it is the preschool teachers who possess the power and decide which material should be present and when.

Population ageing has been posed as a problem for contemporary governing in relation to the allocation and consumption of finite health care resources, in particular acute hospital care. This thesis explores how nursing practice is a key resource in the management of this ???problem???. Employing Foucault???s concept of governmentality, nursing practice is examined as a form of social government that is central to the regulation of hospital care to older people. A governmentality approach enables consideration of the relationship between the macro political context of governing, as embodied in prevailing political rationalities, and their outworking beyond the arenas of formal government in the micro practices of nurses. Specifically, in this research, it reveals how contemporary entrepreneurial rationalities of governing work at a distance to discursively shape the local practices of nurses in the regulation of hospital care to older people. Discourse analysis of interview texts, literature and documents revealed how enterprise rationality was invested in the discourses circulating in the study site, highlighting the power relationships and subject positions available to registered nurses and outcomes produced in the regulation of hospital care to older people. The analysis details how registered nurses activated a range of technologies and practices as they engaged with enterprise discourses, constituting nursing practice as an activity aimed at making up older people as dischargeable subjects. It shows how enterprise is both a practice and way of thinking that directs us toward a particular truth of hospital, hence nursing, care of older people. The thesis illustrates how changes in the ways of governing hospitals have actively transformed the meaning and practice of nursing in the provision of hospital care to older people. It shows how the values and practices that make entrepreneurial modes of government possible penetrate each layer of an organisation and can create new mentalities or ways of thinking. This was evident in this research whereby an entrepreneurial mode of governance had re-imagined the social practice of nursing as a form of the economic, such that neither recovery, nor health, but discharge assumed pre-eminence as the focus and aim of hospital care for older people and hence the goal of nursing practice. These findings suggest that hospital care of older people has become a political and economic, rather than therapeutic concern. Furthermore, nursing interventions in the hospital care of older people have become administrative rather than therapeutic, with nursing practice focused on individual older people only insofar as they are constituted as part of a population at risk of delayed discharge. The thesis contends that nurses are implicated in the politics of health care in new and different ways amid entrepreneurial rationalities of governing that promote an ethos of risk management, individualism and responsibilisation in relation to health. It argues that the replacement of an ethos of nursing as care based on client need with an ethos of nursing as risk management substitutes the therapeutic intent and practices of nursing with the technical intent of managing risk. In so doing, the thesis illustrates dangers and possibilities arising from the re-framing of health care through entrepreneurial modes of governance. It enables a critically informed consideration of what kind of practice acute care nursing could be into the future and how nurses and others can take action to positively contribute to the futures of older people they provide care to. / Thesis (PhD)--University of South Australia, 2010