Play around the computer

This paper is focusing the computer using practice within pre-school activity. Data was collected in three pre-school units with children from 3-6 years of age. The data consists of approximately 13 hours of video-documented observations supplemented by additional field notes of the same events; nine interviews with the teachers and 38 interviews with the children. The study sheds light on the situated valuation, which is ongoing within an institutional practice such as pre-school. The general picture of the teachers’ ways of handling the computer use is described with two main focuses: first, as constituted in the meeting between political visions and every day practice and second, as grounded in the rationality dominating within the discursive practice. In conclusion, it is argued that the dominating rationalities constitute three different meaning shaping practices, in the study labelled as protective, supporting and guiding. These environments do afford quite different possibilities when it comes to getting access to learning about as well as by the computer.