Flytande inflytande : Affektiva relationer mellan barn och miljön i förskolan

Sammanfattning: The purpose of this doctoral thesis is to develop more understandings concerning children’s influence in preschool. By adopting an immanent approach the study centers on young children’s affective relations with the milieu in preschool.The empirical material was produced through approximately 30 hours of observations by video camera and field notes in a preschool department with children aged one to three years. Focus of the observations has been to follow the children in their everyday lives in preschool.The result shows three forms of influence characterized by four qualities. One quality is that influence is understood as collective. This means that the children’s relations always involves other actors, both human and non-human which produces an understanding of influence as fluent in the relations between different actors. Children’s relations also emerge through active affects with a creative quality to produce difference and alternatives. This produces an understanding of a child-influence. The result shows how the active intensity in child-influence also sometimes involves the pedagogues. Other affects that has emerged between the children and the milieu in preschool are the passive ones. These affects decreases the intensity and are characterized by acting as usual and according to routines. The pedagogues’ responses to the children’s relations are characterized by both a standardized response that points to a territorialization of earlier routines and the recognizable, and an affective attunement which emerge as a quality where the pedagogues’ tune in to the children’s affective relations. The affective attunement becomes a possibility for a togetherness-influence.The study concludes that instead of arranging certain situations where children verbally can express their opinions and take part in decision-making the influence of young children can be based on their bodily and affective relations with the milieu in preschool.