Barns gemenskap i förskolan

Sammanfattning: This study is about children’s communities. It is also about children’s everyday interaction in a pre-school setting and how they utilise interactional and institutional resources to construct peer communities and to group themselves within them. The peer communities discussed in this study are embedded in an institutional context, namely the pre-school setting.To capture this phenomenon an ethnographic approach was used. Included in the benefits of choosing this approach are the opportunities to study everyday practices and children’s activities in a pre-school setting. Participant observations, child interviews and video recordings were used when the data were subsequently constructed and analysed.One feature underlying the pre-school setting as a social context is the organisation of time and space. Time and space structure children’s activities and their material and immaterial resources and social relations. This is shown in an example related to a little boy’s (Mattias) story of everyday practices in pre-school. Another illustrative example of how time and space form the structure for routines and social relations is when the children play a game called ‘the ting-a-ling train’. Still another example of an interesting finding was discovered when the children swung together in the pre-school playground.The preschool conditions allow children to construct their own strategies to gain access to the interactive space, where their negotiations and the organisation of time and space are of vital importance. Another important finding is that activity and talk about activity are functions that are inter-related and that children use as interactional resources.When the children become members of a pre-school group they are at the same time constructed as pre-schoolers. They are ‘doing-being’ pre-schoolers and at a same time constructing the everyday practice called pre-school. Interaction and social context are entwined, which means that a study of children’s peer communities in a pre-school setting offers valuable knowledge about the world of children and about the pre-school as a social context.