Global Studies of Childhood

This paper presents and discusses the findings of a collaborative investigation into Nordic approaches to evaluation and assessment in early childhood education and care. The project explored values and principles that underpin and guide evaluation in ECEC systems and practices in five Nordic countries: Denmark, Finland, Iceland, Norway and Sweden. The qualitative study combined documentary analysis with interviews with early childhood educators, academics and policy makers. The study was commissioned by the Nordic Council of Ministers in order to shed light on the values and principles that have guided the evaluation and assessment of the quality of early childhood education and care in the various Nordic countries, the ways in which evaluation and quality assessment has been developed in the Nordic countries and the parties responsible for carrying out the evaluation and assessment. Central to our exploration was whether a coherent Nordic approach exists and what characteristics distinguish it from other possible models of ECEC system evaluation. This question has gained relevance in global contexts of International Large-scale Standardised Assessments in ECEC, promoted most prominently the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD). Our findings confirm the existence of a Nordic approach, consisting of a shared and coherent understanding of the underpinning values, the purpose and the appropriate methodologies across several dimensions of comparison between countries as well as within countries. Shared values and principles include well-being, child-centredness, play, learning, professionalism and reducing inequalities. Shared purpose of evaluation is to provide relevant information to improve the quality of the ECEC system. In consequence, the focus is on evaluating settings and systems that enable children to thrive, rather than assessing individual children. Nonetheless, the Nordic model must be carefully interpreted in its specific contexts. Much responsibility is delegated to the municipality level, leading to local variations and influences. More generally, we found the Nordic approaches to evaluation and assessment in ECEC firmly situated in a Nordic model of governance that emphasises decentralisation and values local democracy. We discuss the implications of this for international comparative research in ECEC, for further research into the relationship between the central and the local in ECEC and for the possibility of an explicit Nordic contribution to informing the global ECEC policy debate.

This article examines the local evaluation and assessment practices of Finnish early childhood education and care (ECEC) based on Actor–Network Theory (ANT). We employ the concept of translation to discuss how evaluation and assessment practices unfold in networks and how actors come together in negotiations and contestations that seek to orient these networks. ANT approaches society as being formed of networks and directs attention to non-human actors, such as technical and material resources. In this article, we discuss how local evaluation and assessment networks are formed by translations connecting different actors. This article examines three cases in which various assessment tools were used locally by Finnish ECEC. The results highlight the arbitrariness and elasticity of the networks in the translation process. Thus, we introduce the concept of democracy of translation to examine the flexibility of assessment networks and the extent to which actors in these networks can re-negotiate and re-orient the practices taking place.

How parents spend time with their children, what they teach their children and how they raise them in the early years have again become topics of policymaking and public debate. There is an intensive discussion about parental involvement in early childhood education and care (ECEC). The Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development’s Starting Strong series provides ECEC policy guidelines for national governments that include guides for parental involvement. With inspiration from the sociocultural policy approach, this paper suggests that there has been a shift in the Starting Strong series from underlining policy ideals for parental partnership to focussing on the learning environment. This paper examines how these transnational ideals (re)appear, transform and shift in the ECEC policy documents released in the first two decades of the 21st century in two Nordic countries: Denmark and Finland. Both Nordic countries have been involved in the Starting Strong series since the turn of the millennium. The paper also outlines how transnational ideals have become entangled in policy documents in these Nordic contexts in varied ways and how parental involvement is politicised across each of the two countries. We argue that this politicisation not only marks an intensification in parenting but also attempts to institutionalise the ECEC–family relationship, implying that the parent as well as the child must be enlightened. Thus, we seek to question the process of problematising the parent and the child’s home in the policies and to enable new thinking and action to address this issue.

According to the national framing of the Swedish preschool system, educators are expected to act as mediators of the dominant language while simultaneously promoting multilingualism. Previous research shows that educators display an insecurity as well as a lack of knowledge of how to implement this dual undertaking. This article examines educators’ dual undertaking of linguistic diversity (changeability), on the one hand, and a national standard (stability) on the other, based on ethnographic data from three preschools with socioeconomic differences. The data are analysed employing concepts from pedagogic theory and linguistic diversity. Bernstein’s competence model with weak classification and framing accommodates translanguaging, giving room for the children’s own linguistic initiatives. Translanguaging is understood from a local as well as a global perspective; the local is based on global norms and global norms relate to local practices. The results show that educators support children as linguistic and multilingual beings. Unlike previous studies showing that middle-class children benefit from the competence model, this study shows how children with different socio-economic backgrounds benefit from the competence model. The diversity of language practice in Swedish pre-schools has the potential to create opportunities for new forms of agency and identity for children.

This article explores how complex globalization processes play out in early childhood education (ECE) in Denmark. The article builds on two concepts of globalization: First, we understand globalization as the ways in which transnational educational policy discourses characterized by neoliberal pedagogical values affect national and local policies. Second, we understand globalization as ways in which cultural diversity as a product of global migration processes is discursively constructed as constituting specific “problems” for early childhood education. Drawing on the first concept of globalization, the article explores how a key policy document, The Strengthened Learning Plan (the SLP), is recontextualized and “put into action” in practice, and whether it leads to practices characterized by globalized neoliberal values at the cost of Nordic pedagogical ideals. We show that the SLP is enacted in very different ways in different centers, giving very different emphasis to globalized and Nordic ideals, respectively, and thus that the globalization of Danish ECE is by no means unambiguous. Looking more closely into the different enactments of the SLP, it becomes clear that they are closely connected to discursive constructions of the demography of the center: Constructions of ethnic minority children draw on culturalized categorizations where children are seen as vulnerable and as lacking, whereas constructions of ethnic majority children draw on non-culturalized categorizations where children are seen as natural and resourceful. Drawing on the second concept of globalization, we argue that the different enactments of early childhood policy build on connections between constructions of cultural diversity (or the lack thereof) and the construction of pedagogical “problems.” As such, the different enactments of the SLP—including those that prioritize Nordic ideals—represent globalization in the sense of constructions of cultural diversity that pose specific problems for early childhood education. Building on these findings, the article argues that the two globalization processes intersect, mutually shaping each other, and affecting how policies are enacted in pedagogical practice.

This article presents retrospections on selected methodological explications of a slow research process with child citizens living in the urban, Sør-Trondelag region of Norway. The process was akin to what Gallacher and Gallagher have termed “muddling through” and was about primarily about ‘arriving at, asking and then attempting to answer the question: What is the scope for the philosophical blossoming of adults when they enter children’s playfully constructed worlds as guests? Particularly, I engage with a post-empirical phase colloquium with one of my main co-explorers, Enaya Mubasher, in the Child and Youth Seminar at the Department of Education and Lifelong Learning, University of Trondheim (Norway) in March 2017. Enaya, a (primary school student at that time) and I first met in 2012 during our commonly shared time in a kindergarten in Trondheim, where I was a kindergarten assistant for Enaya’s group and played with Enaya as part of my job. While I did not first meet Enaya as a “research participant,” our relationship evolved into a co-explorer dynamic after I had stopped working in the kindergarten. Playing with Enaya, included among other efforts, consistently playing with my understanding of what it means to be “me” as an independent “I,” and with it what was expected of me as an (adult) researcher within adult-centric institutional framings. The retrospections accentuate relationality as a defining dimension of rationality in research processes to advance conversations at the intersections of postqualitative and slow research with children from a childist standpoint.