Becoming a Swedish Preschool Child

• In Event: 25.051 - Policy and Policing Children's Identities: Normalizing Frameworks and the Issues of Developmental Discourses

Abstract

The paper examines how migrant children in Sweden are fostered to become Swedish in a preschool setting aiming to integrate them into the Swedish society. The analysis, where Bernstein´s (1971, 2000) concepts of classification, framing and reconceptualization where used, shows that the children are fostered against a background of everyday nationalism, produced in preschool curriculum, recontextualized in the talk of the educators and reproduced in everyday routines in the preschool setting. The analysis shows how the image of the rich and competent child emphasized in Swedish policy documents and the national child centered pedagogy, does not apply for children constructed as the ‘other’. Instead a controlled pedagogy aiming to compensate for something perceived as lacking in the children is legitimized.

Authors

• Annika Maria Cecilia Åkerblom, Gothenburg University

• Anne Harju, Malmö University

• Birgitta Sonja Marit Nordén, Malmö University SWEDEN

• Helen Avery, Lund University