”Här leker vi inte pang pang Lucky Luke!” : Om pedagogers ambivalens till populärkultur i förskolan

Sammanfattning: The purpose of this paper is to examine teachers' approach to popular culture in preschool. The questions we want answered are: What approach do educators have to popular culture in preschool and what underlies that approach? Is there a high - and low culture in preschool? If educators bring popular culture into the preschool, how then is it used? Do children’s culture influence everyday life in preschool?  We have employed qualitative methods to seek answers to our questions. We conducted seven interviews with educators from four different preschools. The starting point for our study was the socio-cultural perspective because we examined people's cultures and how the meeting between them unfolds.  We concluded that educators have a very ambivalent attitude towards popular culture in preschool. Respondents could see popular culture as positive for children's learning, because it makes learning meaningful and enjoyable for the children. But at the same time, they had difficulty relating to popular culture because of its commercialism, the strongly gender-coded roles that frequently occur and the status created around owning the products. We also observed a strong high culture that contrast with popular culture in preschool. High culture was linked to educators' own experiences and values, and to how instructive and useful cultural phenomenon were for the children. Popular culture needs to be connected with a clear learning objective for teachers to consider taking it into the preschool. During the investigation we discovered that teachers enjoy great power over what is brought into the preschool and over what is held out of children's reach. Children's influence over their own culture is limited in preschool. The most prominent aspect of the study was educators' own ambivalence towards popular culture.