What May Characterise Teaching in Preschool? The Written Descriptions of Swedish Preschool Teachers and Managers in 2016

The study investigates how kindergarten teachers and managers in Swedish kindergartens interpret the term ‘teaching’. The research questions were: (1) What characterises teaching in kindergarten according to descriptions given by kindergarten teachers and managers? (2) What levels of didactic thinking can be drawn from the descriptions given by kindergarten teachers and managers?

The results indicate that the action level is more prominent than the theory level or the meta-theory level among Swedish kindergarten teachers and managers. The author emphasises that it may be the case that the participants have more theoretical or meta-theoretical knowledge than what appears in the survey, but that this knowledge is implicit, wordless or tacit and is therefore not expressed in the survey.

A survey consisting of open-ended questions was distributed to 243 kindergarten teachers and managers who were already participating in a three-year research project. Ten Swedish municipalities are represented in the study. The responses were analysed using didactics-oriented text analysis as a theoretical framework. The framework uses three levels: action level, theory level and meta-theory level.

Roth, A.-K. R. (2020). “What May Characterise Teaching in Preschool? The Written Descriptions of Swedish Preschool Teachers and Managers in 2016". Scandinavian Journal of Educational Research, 64(1):1-21.