Förskola för hållbar utveckling : Förutsättningar för barns utveckling av handlingskompetens för hållbar utveckling

• Main Author: Hedefalk, Maria
• Format: Doctoral Thesis
• Language: Swedish
• Published: Uppsala universitet, Institutionen för pedagogik, didaktik och utbildningsstudier 2014
• Subjects: teaching; preschool; sustainable development; children; action competence
• Online Access: http://urn.kb.se/resolve?urn=urn:nbn:se:uu:diva-215087; http://nbn-resolving.de/urn:isbn:978-91-554-8840-6

The overall aim of the thesis is to contribute with knowledge about the conditions for preschool children’s meaning making with regard to sustainable development. With a focus on critical actions, the thesis explores how education is executed and how a critical action may be conducted in a preschool practice. Different teaching situations in preschool have been analysed in order to determine how and which actions are privileged in the various situations, what the consequences of these actions are, and what kind of conditions that enable children to develop critical action competence. The results show that teachers affect children’s meaning making by directing actions toward a specific learning content. The conditions in which children learn action competences for sustainable development may be affected by which actions are privileged or excluded in the situation. The analyses of conditions for children to act critically in this thesis are when: the teacher aims the attention towards a pluralistic teaching content, where the content consists of value judgments. variations of views are highlighted – by the help of other children or from example different viewpoints in a book. children have the courage or/and feel safe expressing contradicting views. Although the situations in which children act critically are few and far between in the empirical material, they do exist and are important to highlight, especially as few other studies explore what meaning making processes look like when critical actions are privileged. The thesis therefore contributes to the research by providing analyses of situations in which children act critically in preschool.