Här tecknar studenter på den erfarenhetsbaserade förskollärarutbildningen, och forskare som undervisar på samma utbildning, en bild av förskolepedagogens praktiska kunskap. Texterna rör sig mellan ett förtroget inifrånperspektiv och ett teoretiskt utifrånperspektiv. Boken kombinerar på så vis en djupgående undersökning av dagsaktuella frågor som relationen mellan omsorg och lärande, det ökade antalet diagnostiserade barn, resursbrist, lek och utbildningens betydelse, samtidigt som den sätter dessa frågor i relation till vilken förskola, och vilket samhälle, vi vill ha.

The article discusses how conflicting logics emanated from different discourses are articulated in parent-teacher conferences in a Swedish preschool. Preschool teachers' reporting of collective learning processes is interrupted by parents' demands for information about their child's individual performance. When parents act as customers in the preschool meeting, pedagogical matters tend to capitulate for the preschool's need to assert itself in a market. The educators express an ambtion to fulfill educational goals. However, in the meetings with parents they are forced to reconcile contradictory logics that intersect preschool as institution in a increasingly competitive education market.

In what way is knowledge embodied and what role does embodied knowledge play in interpersonal professional practices? In this thesis, practical and embodied knowledge of preschool teachers is investigated as an example of a profession where relational and bodily situated knowledge is significant.

The questions, from where my point of departure is taken, are for instance: How does a skilful preschool teacher act? What approach in terms of embodied knowledge is needed if one wants to give care, trust and offer a child a sense of we? Are there dimensions of embodied knowledge that are present only in situations that appear negative? 

This thesis belongs to the academic discipline The Theory of Practical Knowledge. Practical Knowledge in often described as experience based, bodily carried, situated and tied to our emotional life. The Theory of Practical knowledge tries to frame and explain these aspects of knowledge in the situations and contexts where they occur. 

The importance of embodied knowledge, as a form of practical knowledge in relation to preschool teachers professional development, is not a theme that has been scrutinized in other research. In the light of a presupposition that knowledge is bodily carried (a presupposition that is founded in experiences of dance and a phenomenological influenced theoretical base) and that practical wisdom and skill in interpersonal practices exists only in action, this thesis is built upon a concern regarding whether values embedded in these practises could be threatened as a result of the difficulty to grasp them. 

The forms of embodied knowledge possessed by the preschool teachers in this study appear as relational and situated in the co-embodied space in between the preschool teacher and the child, or, more correctly, between everyone in the group. In the interaction enabled by the good relationship the embodied forms of knowledge express themselves as mastery, a skill honed by care that I have chosen to describe using terms such as groove, weight, and empathetic timing. 

This article explores how constructions of identity, race and difference permeate and are challenged in a Swedish preschool class. The study is informed by theories of phenomenology and critical whiteness. Data are drawn from a larger ethnographic study conducted in an ethnically diverse preschool. The purpose of the study was to explore how preschool teachers manage and reflect upon the construction of children’s social identity within the institution of a preschool. This report considers one incident relating to racial identity. It began with a child’s representation, the boy named Stanley, in a self-portrait: ‘I want to be white and blonde when I grow up… I want to be like Oscar, not a black boy’. Within this article we consider teachers’ reflections on this incident, discussing how ‘whiteness’ is performed, constructed and interrogated by young children and adults in the preschool and uncovering a certain institutional ‘colour blindness’. In this example ‘race’ announces itself and the children make it visible as an existing category in their everyday life. Children’s drawings and narratives reveal much about the implicit understandings and norms that surround them, pointing to teachers’ responsibilities for exploring the possibilities and limitations offered in preschool education to deal with these understandings.