Möten som formar - Interaktionsmönster på förskola mellan pedagoger och de yngsta barnen i ett genusperspektiv

In studies concerning the youngest children, the toddlers, the gender perspective is often missing. One aim of the study was, therefore, to investigate the interaction between children and preschool teachers in day care centres in a gender and a contextual perspective. Another aim was to investigate the inner representations of the preschool teachers concerning children and gender. A third aim was to discursively analyse the interview answers of the preschool teachers related to the curricular documents concerning preschool. The domain of interaction focused upon is mainly the intersubjective one, where reciprocity and affect are of great importance. The main research questions of this study were: Which initiatives for contact do the children take? Which response do they get from the preschool teachers? Does this interaction appear differently in various contexts? Do various contexts affect gender in different ways? The study is defined as ethnographic. The methods of data-collection were mainly video recordings and interviews. The interaction between children and staff was observed and the adults were interviewed at three day-care centres. The results indicated that gender was context dependent and that different contexts gave different kinds of gendered interaction. The situations with most pedagogical guidance, the so-called circle times, were dominated by the boys. They took more initiatives and they got more elaborated answers from the preschool staff. The situations with less pedagogical guidance, e.g. the meals, were characterised by rich dialogues in the interaction between the preschool teachers and the children and no special gender differences were found. The girls got elaborated answers to the same extent as the boys. During the free play time, the gender differences concerning the children’s initiative to contact the pedagogues were almost none. There was one boy at each nursery department that was the dominating one, the “Master of the group”. This study also showed that even the young children at the nursery departments were part of the gender construction.