Abstract
ABSTRACTOur aim in this article is to examine policy discourses that promote positional changes for the preschool class in the Swedish educational system. The preschool class is currently going through a watershed period, which is characterized by uncertainty regarding its position in the education system. In this article, we explore changes in the Swedish education system by analysing policy documents from 1997 to 2017 with a specific focus on the positional shift of the preschool class. The departure point for our study is that policy relates to the concepts of subjectification, qualification and socialization. In addition, we examine how these goals in education are to be achieved and the educational restructuring required to do this. The findings show that policy discourses about the preschool class have shifted from pedagogical arguments about the benefits of pedagogical integration, consensus and the move of preschool pedagogy into school education, to more school- oriented, knowledge-economy arguments about increased goal achievement. Schoolarization describes a positional shift in the education system that contains two collaborative processes: an approach towards school content, goals and forms for teaching and a distancing to the content and goals formulated for Early Education and Care.
Highlights
We explore policy changes in the Swedish education system, with a specific focus on the reforms of the preschool class for 6-yearold children
In the process of analysing policy documents for the preschool class, we raise the question: what claims are made about the society that children are supposed to be socialised to?. In addition to these concepts, we explore the educational restructuring policy discourses that promote the positional change of the preschool class
We begin by reporting how the child is described in the policy documents (Table 2): What claims are made about the six-year-old child in preschool class?
Summary
We explore policy changes in the Swedish education system, with a specific focus on the reforms of the preschool class for 6-yearold children. The preschool class was established as a school form in 1998 with the specific focus of providing a bridge between preschool and compulsory school. The purpose of the preschool class is to relate to the surrounding institutions – preschool and school – in order to ‘smooth’ children’s transition from one to the other. The preschool class may be regarded as a ‘borderland practice’ (Ackesjö, 2010), operating in an area that cannot be characterized as either school or preschool. The preschool class has been constructed as an arena located on the border, or in between two school forms, each of which has clear traditions of its own
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