"Matematik är så mycket mer än att räkna" : En diskursanalytisk studie kring matematiska diskurser från facktidskriften Förskolan

Sammanfattning: The aim of this essay is to examine the view the authors of the articles and the teachers have on the topic mathematics and what discourses can compromise the teacher’s point of view and therefore compromise the children’s mathematical self-concept by examining the discourses within the journal Förskolan through a qualitative discourse analysis. I am aiming to highlight what sort of discourses the journal is recreating and thus the preschool teachers bring into the preschool. This is to highlight that the mathematical discourses are a problem and why they can affect the children’s mathematical self-concept. I analyzed the material by using the two perspectives: social constructionism and post-modernism. I am also using Foucault’s discourse concept, Laclau’s subjectivity concept and antagonism concept. The empirical data consist of four articles written by different journalist’s and was published in the journal Förskolan during the year 2016. I conducted a discourse analysis on the four articles and concluded that there were three different discourses embedded in the articles. The three discourses proposed an assumption that Math and numbers are the same thing, that children are competent and teachers incompetent. The result of the analysis is that there existed mathematical discourses inside the journal Förskolan but only two of them will reach the children. Those two discourses are that math and numbers are the same thing and the discourse the incompetent mathematician. I believe this is because these two discourses have a long history inside the Swedish education system and therefor gets recreated by the teachers that have already been affected by the discourses. That leads to all the new students and children going through interpellation by the mathematical discourses.