This article explores the conditions required for preschool managers to support change through research aimed at developing educational practice. It examines factors that enable and constrain support of change and the arrangements that can be identified in relation to these factors. The results suggest that arrangements that support a more technical and accountable form of practice constrain managers’ capacity to support research aiming to change practice. However, the findings also show thatmanagers do have possibilities to support such research. One key factor is whether the research is in line with their goals and efforts. Another is whether they have trust in the researchers and the educators implementing the change. The results also indicate that one way for leaders to enable change is by creating meaningful spaces for sharing experiences and developing practices. This involves the reframing of leadership practices into a more democratic and collaborative approach, and implies that cultural-discursive, material-economic, and social-political arrangements are needed to support such approach. Hence, for research projects aimed at changing educational practice, it is necessary to identify the specific arrangements connected to that practice. This is especially important in times when practice-based research is promoted as a way to attain educational goals. 

In the Nordic countries, there is a culturally rooted understanding of nature as a ‘good’ place for children. The aim of the article is to deconstruct this understanding by exploring how different mobile preschools – buses that bring children to different places on a daily basis – relate to nature spaces and children’s learning and well-being in them. Based on critical theorization of place and the nature/culture divide, we argue that, while there exists an idealization of nature within the mobile preschool tradition, the ways that nature is viewed as ‘good’ for children differ depending on the children’s ethnic background and residential area. The results show that compensatory ideas are especially vivid when it comes to migrant children who live in multi-ethnic neighbourhoods. Education in nature, aiming at freedom and agency, brought forward in the preschool curriculum in the Nordic countries, seems more reserved for children who already have the right kind of cultural background and language. The ‘other’ children, however, are more likely to receive an education aiming to compensate for something perceived as missing – that is, the ‘right’ kind of capital regarding ‘nature’.

The article examines how migrant children in Sweden are fostered to become ‘Swedish’ in a preschool setting aiming to integrate them and their families into the Swedish society. The analysis, where Bernstein’s (1971, 2000) concepts of classification, framing, and reconceptualization are used, shows how the children are fostered against a background of everyday nationalism, produced in preschool curriculum, recontextualized in the talk of the educators and reproduced in everyday routines in the preschool setting. The analysis also shows how the image of the rich and competent child, emphasized in Swedish policy documents and the national child centred pedagogy, does not apply to children constructed as the ‘other’. Instead, a controlled pedagogy aiming to compensate for something perceived as lacking in the children is legitimized.

The article aims to highlight the means of rhythmicity to social life from within a study of children’s daily travelling with a mobile preschool in Sweden. The point of departure is the neglected mobility practices of young children in research and the difficult relation between children’s everyday movements and persistent representations of childhood time and place. Based on sensuous ethnographic fieldwork travelling with the preschool, the analysis deconstructs to visualize mobility modes at work in the enactment of the daily route, and explores to highlight the preschooler’s collective rhythms of practices while travelling. The rhythmanalysis shows how regular mobilities enable shared experiences and the (re)making of a rhythmicity grounded in an ongoing perceiving and managing of inside and outside rhythms. The result confirms young children’s interdependent mobilities from within an entanglement of different rhythms, and contributes with readings of how they ‘carry on’ in practice.

This paper explores language practice in early childhood education for children new to the majority language, discussing how language practice can be transformed through actions such as reflexive dialogues with educators. In a Swedish action-research project, educators and researchers collaborated in reflexive dialogues to develop language practice in a preschool with large linguistic diversity. Various activities forming the basis of the dialogues were implemented, including photography by children enabling them to share their experiences. The results indicate that the educators positioned themselves between two common approaches to language practice for migrant children, i.e. multilingualism and monolingualism, a positioning evident in their language practice. Although striving for a multilingual approach, the educators' daily activity structure and talk about the children recalled monolingual norms, assuming that people with access to several languages must master one before learning another. Through implementing actions including children's perspectives and introducing 'translanguaging', language practice developed towards multilingualism, focusing increasingly on language as a process for expression and meaning-making rather than a tool for mastering the majority language. This approach turned educators away from deficit assumptions, instead emphasising children's skills and agency.

In Sweden, the reception and education of migrant children is seen as a challenge for the school system, and the opinions concerning how to educate and socialize young migrant children differ. The educational system in Sweden, and elsewhere, has historically been given a double function. On the one hand, it is viewed as a mediator of dominant culture, language, and imagined nationality, and on the other hand, in an increasingly globalized world, it is seen as a promoter of values like multiculturalism and tolerance (Hjerm 2001; Lappalainen 2006; Tobin 2013; Mavroudi and Holt 2015; Allemann-Ghionda 2015). As Mavroudi and Holt (2015) point out, schools and preschools are often at the forefront in teaching children to be more accepting and tolerant of differences, as part of a democratic mission. However, at the same time they also remain key sites where national belonging and identity are taught. Both these aspects are at play in the Swedish preschool curriculum and practice. On the one hand, ideals of child-centeredness related to aspects such as tolerance, equality, egalitarianism, democracy and cooperative social relationships are emphasized (Einarsdottir et al. 2014). On the other hand, monolinguistic as well as a monocultural norms prevail in settings aimed for education of the future citizens, and previous research has shown that these norms concern specially immigrant children (Johansson and Pramling Samuelsson 2006; Johansson 2012; Lunneblad 2013). The paper explores how the tension between these different ideas is embedded in the preschool curriculum and how the ideas are interpreted and operationalized. This is made through the lense of everyday nationhood, and therefore specifically at how issues concerning language and culture are expressed in relation to the pedagogy formed around the migrant child. We consider preschool policy documents, educators’ talk as they try to reinterpret the ideas, and everyday routines formed around migrant children. Questions asked are: What are the explicit and implicit purposes of the preschool education for migrant children? Who is the migrant child to be educated and to what ends?

Den här antologin har till syfte att uppmärksamma barns och ungas livsvillkor i Malmö. Vissa av bidragen fokuserar på barn och unga indirekt via praktiker, medan andra berör deras erfarenheter mer direkt. Antologibidragen ger därmed inblick i hur barns och ungas vardag påverkas och begränsas av de materiella och sociala villkoren som finns i staden men också hur de själva erfar, använder och skapar sina och andras livsvillkor i den. Genom att betona såväl strukturella och institutionella aspekters påverkan som barn och unga som subjekt med potential, synliggörs inte bara dessa materiella och sociala villkor utan också hur de kan förändras och omskapas.

Vissa av bidragen i antologin är lösnings- och potentialorienterade, medan andra kritiskt nagelfar förhållanden så som de gestaltas i staden för barn och unga. Text och bildinslagen från utställningen Malmö, vad drömmer du om, producerade av elever från språkintroduktionen och de estetiska programmen vid Malmö Latin- skola, förstärker och befäster ytterligare vårt syfte med antologin.