In recent years in Sweden, preschools in so-called ‘particularly vulnerable areas’ close to large cities have experienced several crises, such as the COVID-19 pandemic and its aftermath, shootings and car fires due to gang violence in the vicinity. Leading and maintaining the preschool as a safe place for the children in its care in a crisis has become an important part of the preschool manager’s leadership role in vulnerable areas. With the support of Judith Butler’s philosophical thinking, the aim of this article is to investigate how precarity is folded into preschool managers’ everyday work in these areas when handling social crises or a sudden emergency. The article draws on Butler’s writings about precarity, characterized by a simultaneous maintenance of and resistance to social norms and strong power structures, as well as how this social condition can be understood in relation to preschool managers’ leadership in crisis situations. The empirical material consists of interviews with preschool managers working in preschools located in particularly vulnerable areas in Sweden. The article concludes that crisis preparedness includes social engagement with staff, children and their families. Precarity and vulnerability can be understood as part of the preschool manager’s daily work, sometimes as a prerequisite for cooperation, establishing relations and mutual exchange with other people in vulnerable situations.

This article investigates alternative ways doing of mathematics in an Early Childhood Education Teacher Programme using aesthetic forms of expression, the body and reflections on ethics, gender and responsibilities in the transition from student teacher at university to a qualified preschool teacher of children aged 4–5 years. The purpose of the article is to explore an interdisciplinary mathematics workshop in which student teachers investigate mathematics with body- and hands-on crafting to better understand how young children experience learning situations. The research design draws on feminist activist social science research, including in-making and crafty research methods. Theoretically and methodologically, inspiration is drawn from relational materialism and Donna Haraway’s scientific engagement with ‘speculative fabulations’ and Anna L. Tsing’s development of ‘arts of noticing’. The study shows that learning mathematics through the body, concrete materials, scientific concepts and fiction can be helpful in the transition from student teacher to preschool teacher. 

Syftet med den här artikeln är att med utgångspunkt tagen i barns berättelser om framtiden utforska andra och nya sätt att ”lyssna-berätta” inom förskoleforskningen. Med grund i den italienska staden Reggio Emilias verksamhet och Loris Malaguzzis och Carla Rinaldis arbeten och utveckling av Reggio Emilias pedagogiska filosofi tillsammans med förskolebarn för mer än 70 år sedan vidareutvecklas i den här artikeln en uppdaterad lyssnande pedagogik, inspirerad av Donna Haraway och Anna Tsing, feministisk nymaterialism och aktivistisk berättandeforskning. Empiriskt material är pedagogisk dokumentation som producerats inom ramen för en interventionsstudie där barn tillsammans med pedagoger utforskat hur det skulle kunna vara att leva och bo i framtiden. Teoretiskt-metodologiskt hämtas inspiration från feministisk forskningsmetodologi och de vetenskapliga metoderna storytelling och arts of noticing. Studien visar att när Reggio Emilias lyssnande förflyttas till en nutida praktik med feministiskt nymaterialistiska teorier och skalanalyser framträder ett vidgat sympoietiskt (samhandlande) och polyfoniskt (flerstämmigt) lyssnande-berättande som väver ihop förskolan med vår nutida omvärld och samtida och kommande samhällskriser.

Background

During the preschool years, children’s development of skills like language and communication, executive functions, and socioemotional comprehension undergo dramatic development. Still, our knowledge of how these skills are enhanced is limited. The preschool contexts constitute a well-suited arena for investigating these skills and hold the potential for giving children an equal opportunity preparing for the school years to come. The present study compared two pedagogical methods in the Swedish preschool context as to their effect on language and communication, executive functions, socioemotional comprehension, and early math. The study targeted children in the age span four-to-six-year-old, with an additional focus on these children’s backgrounds in terms of socioeconomic status, age, gender, number of languages, time spent at preschool, and preschool start. An additional goal of the study was to add to prior research by aiming at disentangling the relationship between the investigated variables.

Method

The study constitutes a randomized controlled trial including 18 preschools and 29 preschool units, with a total of 431 children, and 98 teachers. The interventions lasted for 6 weeks, preceded by pre-testing and followed by post-testing of the children. Randomization was conducted on the level of preschool unit, to either of the two interventions or to control. The interventions consisted of a socioemotional and material learning paradigm (SEMLA) and a digitally implemented attention and math training paradigm (DIL). The preschools were further evaluated with ECERS-3. The main analysis was a series of univariate mixed regression models, where the nested structure of individuals, preschool units and preschools were modeled using random variables.

Results

The result of the intervention shows that neither of the two intervention paradigms had measurable effects on the targeted skills. However, there were results as to the follow-up questions, such as executive functions predicting all other variables (language and communication, socioemotional comprehension, and math). Background variables were related to each other in patterns congruent with earlier findings, such as socioeconomic status predicting outcome measures across the board. The results are discussed in relation to intervention fidelity, length of intervention, preschool quality, and the impact of background variables on children’s developmental trajectories and life prospects.

Within the field of developmental science, there is a general agreement of the need to work together across academic disciplinary boundaries in order to advance the understandings of how to optimize child development and learning. However, experience also shows that such collaborations may be challenging. This paper reports on the experiences of bidirectional collaboration between researchers in a multidisciplinary research team and between researchers and stakeholders, in the first randomized controlled trial in Swedish preschool. The objective of the trial was to investigate the effects of two pedagogical learning strategies evaluating language, communication, attention, executive functions and early math. The interdisciplinary team includes researchers from early childhood education, linguistics, developmental psychology and cognitive neuro science. Educational researchers and theorists within the field of early childhood education in Sweden have during the last two decades mainly undertaken small-scale qualitative praxis-oriented and participative research. There is a widespread skepticism with regards to some of the core principles in controlled intervention methodologies, including a strong resistance towards individual testing of children. Consequently unanticipated disagreements and conflicts arose within the research team, as RCT methodology requires the measurement of effects pre and post the intervention. The aim of this article is to discuss the conditions for bidirectional collaboration both between researchers and stakeholders and between researchers in the research team. The findings illustrate strategies and negotiations that emerged in order to address ontological and epistemological controversies and disagreements. These include (a) the negotiation of research ethics, (b) making divergences visible and learning from each other, (c) using a multi-epistemological and methodological approach as a complement to the RCT design and (d) the negotiation of research problems that are shared between educators and researchers.