ERIC Number: EJ1043335
Record Type: Journal
Publication Date: 2014-Sep
Pages: 8
Abstractor: As Provided
Reference Count: 27
ISBN: N/A
ISSN: ISSN-1836-9391
Teacher-Parent Relations and Professional Strategies: A Case Study on Documentation and Talk about Documentation in a Swedish Preschool
Löfdahl, Annica
Australasian Journal of Early Childhood, v39 n3 p103-110 Sep 2014
The article is framed by a project designed to study the teacher profession in a current Swedish preschool through work on systematic documentation of quality. Questions deal with how teachers handle the demands on visibility, how they perform and what aspects of the teaching profession will be exposed and what parts will be silenced. This article examines documentation directed towards parents in one public preschool setting over a school year. Apart from weekly parental letters, the data consisted of observations from a staff meeting focusing on teachers' talk while producing the yearly quality account (QA), the content of the final written QA and a follow-up interview. In this case, the requirement of involving the parents in the work on systematic documentation is a traditional but recently clearly expressed policy in the Swedish Education Act. Analysis is based on theories of education policy and how the policy needs to be handled in the local context by the teachers, and theories on the teacher profession and professionalism. The results show that professional strategies like keeping distance vs. keeping closeness are connected to teacher-parent relations such as "trust" and "mate" relations. Teacher-parent relations as "emotional" were found in talks about documentation, and professional strategies to obscure and neutralise were found in relation to the QA.
Descriptors: Case Studies, Preschool Children, Observation, Educational Policy, Educational Legislation, Foreign Countries, Documentation, Educational Quality, Letters (Correspondence), Interviews, Preschool Teachers, Parent Teacher Cooperation, Trust (Psychology), Educational Change, Teaching (Occupation)
Early Childhood Australia. P.O. Box 7105, Watson, ACT 2602, Australia. Tel: +61-2-6242-1800; Fax: +61-2-6242-1818; e-mail: publishing@earlychildhood.org.au; Web site: http://www.earlychildhoodaustralia.org.au
Publication Type: Journal Articles; Reports - Research
Education Level: Preschool Education; Early Childhood Education
Audience: N/A
Language: English
Sponsor: N/A
Authoring Institution: N/A
Identifiers: Sweden

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