| Summary: | The Swedish preschool curriculum and policies place a heavy emphasis on establishing and maintaining long-lasting relationships between the preschool and the home. This engagement between home and preschool is considered central for child well-being and healthy development of the child. The central target of inquiry in this study was thus to investigate the child-, parent and teacher’s understanding of what parent engagement in Swedish preschools is, with particular emphasis on the child’s perspective. The importance of understanding children’s learning as embedded in the social, cultural and family contexts in which it occurs contributes to the overall consensus that children will, in a well-being-, development- and learning perspective, do better with parents who are actively engaged in their children’s pedagogical life. Thus, designing pathways in order to develop the communication between home and preschool is considered a significant factor in children’s developmental outcomes. Against this background, the thesis took its point of departure in the perspective of the child and applied the theoretical framework of the Bronfenbrenner Ecological Systems Theory focusing on the interaction between the developing child and the parent and teacher in the preschool context. The study assumed a transformative worldview and a narrative design was applied in order to determine how the participants, specifically the child, personally experience parent engagement. Narratives were collected through interviews, then assembled into a case-study highlighting the interconnectedness of the stories through a thematic analysis. Through identifying harmonies and contradictions in the stories, the thesis has investigated the construct of the child’s-, the parent’s- and the preschool teacher’s understanding of parent engagement in the Swedish preschool. From that perspective the thesis has identified where their stories align and where they contradict, thus broadening the academic debate in regard to how parents and teachers can better prepare themselves for the dialogues within the micro-societies that their children’s immediate world consists of
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