Making the invisible visible? Everyday lived experiences of ‘seeing’ and categorizing children’s well-being within a Danish kindergarten

Abstract

This article explores how pedagogues assess and categorize children’s well-being in the everyday life of a kindergarten caring for a large number of children considered socially vulnerable. Based on ethnographic fieldwork, the article focuses on a newly implemented well-being assessment tool oriented towards making all children’s needs visible through the pedagogues’ regular colour-categorizations of their state of well-being. The article problematizes this ambition and proposes that some children are rendered invisible in the process of categorizing. It is argued that the categorizations are more reflective of the structural conditions of the kindergarten and a gauged sense of urgency.