I en liten spricka i strukturen… : En observationsstudie av förskolebarns aktörskap genom platsskapande

Sammanfattning: The preschool is often looked upon as an institution for the parents and guardians, with an aim to influence the children. If we change the perspective, from the adult to the child´s perspective, we might find that the preschool with its places and activities is created by the children who live their everyday lives there. Through an ethnographic study, consisting of observations, I examined how the children in a preschool, ages three to five, enter a specific place in a certain time during the preschool day – a so-called time space. This time space is an occasion for waiting on each other and waiting for a new activity to start - a small crack in the preschool structure. In what way can children´s agency be expressed in this small time space? To find the answer to my question I observed the social interactions of the children, with a perspective of childhood sociology and Corsaro´s (2014) theories of peer cultures, interpretive reproduction, and sharing and controlling as a starting point and as a tool for my analysis. The results show that children constantly seek to gain control of their lives through different strategies of getting themselves in and out of interaction and activities. They create their own space within the time space and during this study they clearly influence the meaning of the time space by re-creating and creating new routines and meaning. Through their peer cultures, the constant control seeking, and by just being in the room, the children can be seen as active agents by their interpretation and reproduction of the meaning of the time space. My conclusion is that children take whatever space they´re given in the preschool structure and make it their own. In this way they are active agents of the preschool.