Negotiation through knowledge: How preschoolers get to write the way they want

In Nordic research on institutional educational practices, children are rarely described as active participants in the teaching process (Bergnehr, 2019). The same picture is given in Swedish curricula, where children in pre-school age and students in early grades are often described as passive objects who must "gain" knowledge and "develop" abilities (Billmayer m.fl., 2019; Forsberg, 2021). Instead, the teachers are the ones who are responsible for the activity and the agency in the classroom (cf. Cassidy & Lone, 2020; cf. Nilsen, 2018). Such a view of the roles of students and teachers creates expectations for a certain course of action in teaching. This study is a contribution to our knowledge of how students, preschoolers, gain and take influence in institutional educational practices, and how their influence is enabled and constrained. The influence of preschoolers and their possible space for action in writing lessons are discussed in relation to the expected roles. The aim is to make visible the willingness and possibilities of preschool students to influence teaching by exploring how they negotiate with teachers, what they negotiate about, and how their actions are managed in the current writing situation. The data consists of observations of planned writing lessons in a preschool class, i.e. children aged six year old. The theoretical framework is based on a discourse analytical perspective with a focus on speech acts, agency, roles, legitimacy, and normalization. The results show that preschoolers negotiate both the content of writing assignments and their actual performance, and that students' negotiations can take place through protests and persuasion as well as through silence. The negotiations can be based on the fact that the students either have knowledge about the current genre or that they lack this knowledge. The results also show that teachers begin by trying to persuade students to do as the teachers have planned, before letting the students do it in their own way. This means that the teachers, initially, do not see the students as active co-creators of neither the teaching content nor the teaching methods.