Förekommer kränkande behandling? : En kvalitativ studie av förskolebarn och pedagoger.

Sammanfattning: The following paper is about degrading treatment in preschools and the essay discuss degrading treatment according to the Swedish school law, in preschools and the chosen focus for this study is three to four year old children. The aim is to see whether or not preschool children proceed with degrading treatment towards other children and if preschool teachers believe that children this young have the ability to do so. The questions for this study are: Can children proceed with degrading treatment towards each other? Which conflicts evolve through children’s interactions? Can children in pre-schools have a degrading behavior? To answer these questions participant observation at two preschools and interviews with four preschool teachers were chosen as method. The perspective of this paper is based on the view on children as actors, which is used to acknowledge and enhance the possibilities of letting the children’s own voices be heard. Theories used for this paper is Van Ausdale and Feagin’s (2001) theory about three to four years olds awareness, one about children’s relation to adults presented by Thorne (1993) and Wyness (2012) and lastly Gripsruds explanation of the influence of media combined with statistics from Statens medieråd (Swedish media council). The result of this study show that children between the ages of three to four, use different strategies to include or exclude other children and used things such as age and limitations of participants in a play as excuses. However, these reoccurring excuses cannot be seen as degrading treatment or behavior, according to definition made by the school law. An interesting finding is that the children sometimes used their parents to excuse their actions or used them to threat others. Overall the observational study shows how difficult it can be to see and acknowledge degrading treatment within preschools. The interviews with the preschool teachers indicates that they do not spend much time on acknowledging or trying to prevent degrading treatment amongst children. The preschool teachers discussed children’s quarrels but they tended to see it as something natural within children’s interactions. The conclusion of this essay is that degrading treatment could not be seen at the two preschools, which is contradicting to some of the literature used in this paper.