When Danish parliament in 2018 agreed to an amendment to the Act on Early Childhood Education and Care (ECEC), the main goal was to strengthen the pedagogical curriculum by providing a pedagogical foundation to family daycares (0-2-year-olds), day nurseries (0-2-year-olds) and kindergartens (2-5-year-olds). A foundation that rests on key elements such as play, children’s perspectives and establishing pedagogical learning environments throughout the day (Ministry of Children and Education, 2020).
The pedagogical foundation reflects a return to Danish ECEC traditions and, thus, welcomed by most municipalities, practice, unions and other ECEC stakeholders (Togsverd, 2018). However, tension quickly rose amongst them since the foundation also provided a battlefield of interpretation. The foundation’s somewhat vague clauses regarding e.g. children’s continuity to school, how to understand play and learning and how to establish learning environments (see Ministry of Children and Education, 2020) left stakeholders with very different agendas when working towards implementation of the full curriculum by March 1st 2021.
This research addresses the implementation of the pedagogical foundation in Aarhus, the second largest city in Denmark. With an ethnographic approach, the study uses anthropology of policy and Actor-Network Theory (ANT) and shows that there is no direct implementation of the pedagogical foundation into practice. Rather there are many unforeseen and even surprising acts and endeavors (cf. Sutton & Levinson, 2001), when a national Act moves from design to Danish parliament to local government, unions and leadership to practitioners, parents and children.
The research is part of an extended study that explores the whole chain of translation in which actors transform, interpret and modify the pedagogical foundation (cf. Latour, 2005). However, this paper focuses on the translation of a national pedagogical foundation to a local version. A translation of national values, which is customary in other areas of politics, but unique to a Danish ECEC context where other municipalities have taken on the national pedagogical foundation as it is.
The translation process was set off by a group of prominent people in Aarhus ECEC, i.e. the head of the daycare association, the pedagogues’ and the assistants’ unions, the local administration (municipality) and the mayor of Children and Youth. The research explores how these competing actors embrace the values put forward in the national pedagogical foundation and are able to come together and establish a strong “we” (Jenkins, 2014). A perception of unity that stabilizes the network and enables them to translate the national pedagogical foundation into an Aarhus version with the aid from local politics and strategies.
The research addresses the following research questions: How does the national pedagogical foundation translate from national level to a local administrative level? How do actors whose relationships are imbued with tension and conflict cooperate? And why are they keen to do so?
Addressing the above, the research adds to the current dialogue on policy processes and local implementation of national and European laws and strategies. By using anthropology of policy and ANT, we argue for an approach that advocates a broad analytical perspective, which includes inquiries into the relationship between documents, tools and technologies and the connection to what people say, think and do.