Across western countries Early Childhood Education has become an area of increased political and economic interest (Fuller, Bridges, and Pai 2007). As a way of strengthening the professionalism, and thus the quality of education going on in nursery schools and kindergartens, evaluation schemes, tests and evidence based programs are seen as important means (Krejsler 2013, Plum 2012). The logic embedded herein implies that scientific knowledge informing the different programs and schemes can be transmitted more or less unproblematicly to practice. And that the practice of nursery teachers will be enlightened by transforming their practice into written descriptions and standardized procedures.

Based on insights from ANT perspectives (Law 1994, Callon 1986), this paper explores the transition of  everyday educational knowledge as it is performed through artefacts such as schemes, programs and references to scientific knowledge. Central to the paper is the concept of purification (Latour 1993), that is the way ‘facts’ about children as well as every day routines are established – mobilized and stabilized  -  as scientifically grounded truths that smooth away messiness and complications; and how these ‘truths’ are given a particular status. As part of this, the paper analyzes how experiences of legitimacy and professional authority are produced in the day-to-day practices as well as through the transition of educational knowledge into purified forms.  

Questions central to the paper are:

• How is knowledge enacted as part of the everyday practice in nursery schools?
• What stabilizes and mobilizes the experience of professional authority for nursery teachers?
• How are artefacts, such as schemes, programs etc., used and what role do they play in relation to the stabilization and mobilization of knowledge and professional authority?

Perspectives drawn from ANT are as such made points of entry to study educational knowledge not as a representation, a body of knowledge, or a latent attribute to a single person, but as an assemblage of everyday enactment (Fenwick and Edwards 2010: 21ff), in this case involving children, tables, diapers, categories etc. and nursery teachers (in plural). Schemes, texts with expert advice, programs and so forth are therefore also studied, not as representations, but as artefacts that are translated and thereby stabilizing the everyday enactment of knowledge in certain ways. In this process identities are formed thus producing experiences of legitimacy and of professional authority. 

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