Bryt den hungriga ditt bröd : En diskursanalys av förskolans värdegrund i nutida och historiska läroplanstexter

Sammanfattning: This essay is a study of the core values of the Swedish preschool curriculum. The national preschool curriculum begins by outlining the foundation of core values which the preschool education rests on. In the new national preschool curriculum Lpfö18, which takes effect in the summer of 2019, the core values have been changed to some extent. This raises the questions: where do these core values come from and how different are they from previous core values? Therefore, the main research questions of this study are: what core values discourse is created in Lpfö18 and how does it compare to core values discourses from previous preschool curricula? The empirical data used for this study consists of extracts from different national preschool curricula and similar pedagogical texts in which core values are presented. To process the empirical data, the study used discourse analysis. In particular, the study used the terms “nodal points” and “floating signifiers” from theorists Laclau & Mouffe (2008) and was also inspired by the practices of text analysis outlined by Fairclough (2013). Through the use of discourse analysis, it has been possible to study continuity and change in the core value discourses as expressed in preschool curricular texts. The results show that the values most central to the core value discourse in the new national curriculum, such as democracy and human rights, can be traced back to the core value discourses in previous curricula and also to an international children’s rights discourse. The study also found that some core values from earlier curricula were still left as traces in the new text. Core values related to human rights in particular were found to be important in every version of core values discourse studied. However, there were also values which had been included in the discourse more recently or which had been excluded, which shows that there is both continuity and change in the preschool core values discourse.