| Summary: | There was a culture debate during 2019 in the Swedish newspaper, Dagens Nyheter, about what kind of literature children should take part of. We took an interest in the debate and wanted to study teachers’ approach to literature in preschools. We found a problem whether the literature should have an educational purpose for the unready child or as stated in the curriculum that children should be viewed as owners of their agency. From the social constructivism concepts of being and becoming, this paper aims to investigate educators’ selection processes of literature and approaches to reading in preschools, and to conceptualise how this type of literary content can be used to teach children civic pointers.In this qualitative study we interviewed people who were working in preschools. We included teachers from different workplaces, assignments and age groups. The results of this study show that the preschools not exclusively have a being or becoming approach to literature, but that the approaches actually coexist in the everyday work. That is, the children are sometimes considered competent enough to handle rather complex ethical problems in the literature, but in other situations the preschool teachers change the stories to for example not scare the children. The literature had distinct purposes in the preschools, for example to help the children reflect over different life situations and teach them how to properly handle such situations. A common strategy the teachers used to accomplish this was to change the stories or characters of the literature they used. In conclusion, this study shows that the selection processes of literature in preschools aim for children to recognise themselves in the literature and it should be developing and challenging for the children. Furthermore, teachers make conscious choices when reading to the children. We also found that teaching civic pointers to children is a constant process in early education. This study can help teachers to be aware of how literature is selected in preschools, that different approaches to literature might form children and that it is an ongoing process.
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