Session Information
23 SES 07 D, Interpreting and Enacting Reform Locally
Paper Session
Time:
2009-09-29
15:30-17:00
Room:
HG, HS 21
Chair:
Risto Rinne
Contribution
Privatization and marketization of the educational sector and, as a part of the same, the preschool has been strongly driven in Sweden during the past decades. Consequences following these processes have mainly been discussed in terms of social and cultural segregation. However, we still know very little about the impact these processes have on actual preschool practice and on involved preschool staff, parents and children. The overarching aim of the project “The challenged preschool” is to study the impact on public preschool practice by the establishment of a private preschool in a housing area previously dominated by only public preschools. The theoretical perspective guiding the project as a whole is that educational policy is not only ‘done’ to people, but also pose problems to their subjects, that have to be solved in context (e.g. Ball, 2006). We assume the educational market to have an impact on shared images of ‘best practice’ in preschool and that these practices are shaped in local and specific context as products of the teachers’ and parents’ dealing with the problem they confront.
The empirical studies are conducted within a performance-based approach to narratives (Peterson & Langellier, 2006), thus viewing parents’ and teachers’ storytelling as discursively embedded and socially situated actions. Moreover, stories are seen as constrained by situational and material conditions and at the same time as strategically distributed to criticize and reproduce relations of knowledge and power.
The aim of the presentation is to discuss locally situated and distributed stories on best practice in preschool in relation to national and local contexts of educational policy.
Method
Our empirical study has focused on a specific housing area and consists of interviews with teachers and managers in one public and in one newly established private preschool and with parents of children attending the private preschool. The focus of the interviews has been on how teachers and the manager of the public preschool perceive the establishment of the private preschool, the consequences for their own preschool practice and on their strategies in handling the new situation. The interview conducted in the private preschool dealt with the goals and ambitions guiding the establishment and with the recruitment of children. The parent interviews dealt with their motives for choosing the private preschool and with their perceptions of what characterizes a good preschool.
Expected Outcomes
Preliminary results show that teachers’ and parents’ stories about the establishing of the private preschool both invoke and challenge culturally dominating narratives of ‘public preschool’. The stories emphasize both dangers and possibilities following the establishment of a market of competition between preschools, like the importance of providing children with proper conditions to learn and develop and the importance of security and continuity as qualities defining a good preschool. All in all, the results show partially conflicting stories. The performance-based approach to narrative applied in this study suggests that the nuances and variations detected in the stories also contribute to our understanding of the local struggle over the power to define and shape the best practice in preschool. Following this, the study contributes to previous research on privatization and marketization of education and preschool practice by its focus on the narrative sense making in context.
References
Ball (2006) Education Policy and Social Class. The selected works of Stephen J Ball. London: Routledge. Peterson & Langellier (2008) The performance turn in narrative studies. Narrative Inquiry, 16 (1), 173-180.
Search the ECER Programme
- Search for keywords and phrases in "Text Search"
- Restrict in which part of the abstracts to search in "Where to search"
- Search for authors and in the respective field.
- For planning your conference attendance you may want to use the conference app, which will be issued some weeks before the conference
- If you are a session chair, best look up your chairing duties in the conference system (Conftool) or the app.