Implicitte og eksplicitte krav til krop og sprog i det systematiske arbejde med børnehavebørns sociale kompetencer

Kindergarten pedagogy in Denmark has undergone a change in recent decades, from a focus on free play to an increasing degree of governance in the form of educational curricula with an increased focus on teaching and preparing the children for school. In this article, the researcher investigates the implicit and explicit pedagogical demands, with a special focus on the curriculum objective of social skills. The purpose is to investigate the type of demands that are placed on the children through the systematic educational provision in this curriculum objective, through so-called manual-based programmes that kindergarten teachers must follow, and the consequences this may have.

The overall conclusion is that the programmes demand a great amount of self-work from the children concerning both language and body. The manual-based teaching programmes place demands on the children’s self-awareness, self-control and self-reflection. In order for the children to succeed, they must have good language skills in order to express their emotions. This requires a good vocabulary as well as special attention to one’s own emotions. Emotions are also linked to children’s bodies in that the programmes introduce the children to thorough examinations of gaze direction, postures and facial expressions. In addition, there is a requirement that the children must keep still and calm during the meetings. The researcher believes that these demands are too difficult to meet for some of the children, and therefore there is a risk that the programmes exclude certain children, when the intention was actually to include all of them.

The empirical material consists primarily of ethnographic fieldwork, which is supplemented by interviews. The fieldwork took place over a period of four weeks in three different Danish kindergartens. The researcher spent most of the time in departments for older children (3-6 years old), but also observed toddler departments (0-3 years old) and pre-school groups (6-7 years old). A selection criterion for the kindergartens was that they used manual-based programmes. The data also consists of observation at a Free of Bullying full-day seminar for kindergarten teachers, and interviews with the coordinators of two of the kindergartens, three kindergarten teachers, as well as instructors from the Free of Bullying and Step by Step programmes. Both of these manual-based programmes deal with children’s personal and social skills and use posters with instructions to the educators on how to teach the children.

Pedersen, O. (2018). "Implicitte og eksplicitte krav til krop og sprog i det systematiske arbejde med børnehavebørns sociale kompetencer". Praktiske Grunde. Nordisk tidsskrift for kultur- og samfundsvidenskab, 12(3-4):53-76.