Doing pre-school: knowledge utilization and discursive patterns during pre-school planning meetings

The aim of this research is to study knowledge utilization and discursive patterns during pre-school planning meetings fronstage. The study is designed as a qualitative case study based on tape recordings of five planning meetings and three video documented activities. Three pre-school teachers and three researchers participated. In the analysis, Foucault’s work on discursive practices is used as theoretical framework. The study highlights knowledge used and cited in the local negotiations. The conclusions are that the knowledge used is based on both professional knowledge related to children's learning and development, and local knowledge of children and their abilities, conditions and personalities. The professional knowledge appears as rather implicit and it is primarily the local knowledge of children and their individual needs and circumstances that is most clearly expressed. Dominant discursive patterns are formulated as the staff make themselves responsible for making the pre-school activity not school-like for the maturing child. On the front stage arena the teachers' tasks primarily appears as a desire to maintain the pre-school content in accordance with pre-school ideology that also controls how they see the children’s learning in pre-school in another perspective than student learning in a school context