The purpose of this thesis was to study how preschool teachers interpret the values of the preschool curriculum that relates to culture and how the teachers describe how they work with these values in their professional practice. The study is based on social constructive and discourse analytic perspectives. I have studied how preschool teachers construct the concept of culture and the values of the preschool curriculum through a specific way to describe this. A specific way to talk about something is called a discourse. In other words I have studied preschool teachers expressed discourses about culture and their professional practice with the values of the preschool curriculum. To study this, I've done interviews with four preschool teachers. In the interviews I let the teachers interpret the words from the pre-school curriculum that relate to culture and describe how they work with these in their professional practice. In the next step I used the transcribed interviews for the discourse analysis. I did the analysis by searching for discursive patterns in what preschool teachers say. It appeared that all preschool teachers used the same words in the interpretations and descriptions, and that some of these words were described to have internal relationships between each other. The words that were described to relate to each other were: The family and The preschool, Similarity and Difference, and The individual and the Group. But the words and the relationships where described in different ways in the interpretations of the curriculum and in the descriptions of the practical work. I interpreted this to be two different discourses, one discourse about the words in curriculum and one discourse about their practical work. I call these: The discourse about the theory and The discourse about the practice. Within the discourse about the theory all children were described as culturally different from each other and that was a positive value that the pre-school should plan the work around. The work should also be planned around the children’s individual interests and cultures. The relationship between the family and the preschool where described as an important and unproblematic part of this work. In the discourse about the practice only some children was described as different. It was the children that by the teachers were interpreted as non-Swedish. Only these where described to have an individual culture, different from the Swedish culture. They were describe as different from "us", from the Swedes. In this discourse the relationship with the so called different children’s families were described as a very important part of the preschools work with culture, but the relationship with the children of the interpreted Swedish families was not described to be as important. To work with what the preschool teachers described as a Swedish culture was also very important so that the different children would be able to be a part of the group, the swedes. Finally, I looked at how these two discourses relate to other discourses within the school system that I have seen in other scientific studies. When doing so, I saw both similarities and differences from other discourses. The way to describe some children to be different from others, different from "us" was one similarity, but the aim to plan the pre-schools work around the children’s individual interests was for example different from the other discourses.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:UPSALLA1/oai:DiVA.org:sh-25735 |
| Date | January 2014 |
| Creators | Olsson Aas, Erika |
| Publisher | Södertörns högskola, Lärarutbildningen |
| Source Sets | DiVA Archive at Upsalla University |
| Language | Swedish |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Student thesis, info:eu-repo/semantics/bachelorThesis, text |
| Format | application/pdf |
| Rights | info:eu-repo/semantics/openAccess |
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