Transcript in Pre-school, Annica Löfdahl and Héctor Pérez Prieto, Karlstad

The performative preschool
–narratives about ‘the best practice’
in pre-school
Annica Löfdahl
Héctor Pérez Prieto
Karlstad University
Sweden
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“If we write out that we are bad –
it’s no good publicity!”
(quotation from interview with school leader Eva)
“…what we wish should be written, it is
… It is hardly possible to have that
kind of document. It is nothing that
will sell! ... “
(quotation from interview with pre-school teachers)
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Background
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The last decades increasing societal interest on
children and their education
A “new professionalism” which stresses teachers’
responsibility for planning, accomplishment and
evaluation of the practices
The Swedish preschools’ ‘new legitimacy’, that also
brought new demands on visibility
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Pedagogical documentation that contributes to children’s
visibility as subjects
The state and parental demands on visibility. Practices are
supposed to be available for public inspection and control
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The visible preschool – three interrelated
perspectives
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A societal level – connections to the last decades
increasing decentralization, privatization and new
forms of control
A local level – connections to parental choice and
open competition on a “quasi market”
A practice level – pedagogical demands on
documentation, and access to public control, of
children's and teachers’ activities
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The purpose with this paper is to get more
insight in ‘the practice level’
the significance of and the practical work with
planning- and evaluation documents as well as quality
accounts
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Talks and interviews with teachers and school leaders
about these documents were analysed as institutional
narratives about the Swedish preschool, about the
teachers, the children and their conditions in the
preschool
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Theoretical frames
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Locally produced texts are regarded as institutional
narratives (Somers & Gibson, 1994), designed for
public control - from above and from outside – in
which the teachers…
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… stress what the preschool is and should be
… relate to local and national guiding documents
… emphasize comparative advantages on the local
(quasi)market
… carry out their own projects
As such, the texts are not only descriptions of the
practice, but work as normative and powerful tools in
the formation of the pedagogical practice.
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Tools for analyses in this paper
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Performativity:
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‘Terrors of performativity’ (from Lyotard, in Ball, 2006)
Performances as means for control and change
We use the concept to interpret how
 teachers show their work and what teachers and school
leaders regard as ‘best practice’
 education and teachers’ social identity are changed
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Interview with Eva –
30 years of experience in preschool
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Teacher, superintendent and now a school leader
Our talk focused on
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content in the preschool activities
the efforts to visualize quality in the preschool
we try to get her perspective as a school leader on the
production of planning- and evaluation texts
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Interview with the pre-school teachers Sven
and Ingela
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Sven has 8 years and Ingela has 20 years of experience
as teachers …
… working in the same working team for two years
Their pre-school is situated in an area with low SES,
where many children have special needs
Our talk related to the talk with Eva and focused
on
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Their work with planning- and evaluation documents and
quality accounts, and …
… the significance of these documents in their daily
work
What priorities were made
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Three themes were made from both
interviews
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Flexibility and adjustment
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Priorities
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The ”market”
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Flexible and changeable are key words in Eva’s
presentation
“There is always something, some new direction, a
new way to look upon this that makes you ‘change
foot’, a bit, even if you keep both feet firmly on the
ground, you have to be flexible …”
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It is also about balancing between different
demands – from local and state public
administration, parents and themselves – and
realise what is reasonable and possible to do …
“what does these children need”.
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The image of the flexible leader and the flexible staff
is clearly portrayed in Eva’s words.
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In the teachers’ talk, adjustment are the key
word.
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In their daily work they must consider the concrete
demands of the pre-school activity as well as
specific needs among the children.
“We need to adjust to the situation as it actually looks”,
“It might not be what one has imagined that is prioritized,
but other things in need of prioritizing. Most of the
planned activities are still there, but not in the same
amount as initially planned.”
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According to the teachers, what you have planned
and written in the documents might come
secondly when the real everyday situations
appear.
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About priorities:
 The quality account and its supposed content
becomes an argument and a criterion for what is
done in Eva’s preschools
“… but we cannot do everything at the same time, one
have to pick out something, and of course it must
characterize our work, because later it has to be part of
our quality account – how it went on, how it turned out,
what happened …”
 Eva tells us they have been engaged with great effort in
developing common templates with special design for
content and structure of the accounts…
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The teachers show another perspective of what is
prioritized by focusing on what is not present in the
pre-schools presentations.
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They argue there is some pedagogical stuff that is
not possible to show, due to the reasons of secrecy,
as
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“I think that one doesn’t always show the whole practice,
rather one show what is, what is visible in some way…”
“all the social work we do with the children”.
The templates – initially designed to visualize their
practice- also contributes to the in-visibility of what’s
problematic in the practice
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The market
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Eva and her colleagues discuss the possibility to write
different accounts.
“When discussing it we thought like this: why are we
doing this quality account?, why are we doing it for…for
whom? Is it for us, for the administration, for the Agency
for Education, for the government? For whom are we
doing this? The parents maybe …
Actually it is a quality account that we want to do for our
own, to evaluate our own work related to the steering
documents, to see if : are we getting better?, are we
developing our activities?, if anything happens?
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…continuation…
Then, we ought to have one quality account for the
Internet, where parents log in and look, and the public at
large can log in and look …”are we suppose to place our
children at preschool xx, or xx, that might be
something?”
And then they are reading… Who on earth want to
write all failings!, …published on the net, and the
parents who are suppose to choose our preschool, they
should say – “No, they never make it within the limits of
the budget, they have to cut down, now this way, now
that…
We don’t want that, because we want children to come
here, that is for us to stay alive of course, we want
children and parents to apply for our preschool… If we
write out that we are bad – it’s no publicity!
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…continuation…
We want to keep that for our selves, so actually we should formulate
one for our selves, one for the Internet and maybe one for the
administration, so they can have their stuff, what they want to know
about. We have been discussing this in my group of school leaders,
but to be able to make three accounts - blowed if I know – because
we discussed it a lot … for whom are we writing this?”
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This is a keystone to one of the paradoxes of performativity:
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the accounts that are supposed to make the preschool
more visible, might in practice make them more opaque
The issue for Eva and her colleagues is to write one
account that answer questions from authorities, and form
the basis for their own development work, and to write in a
manner that makes the failings and shortcomings invisible.
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When talking to the teachers, they agree about the fact
that it is common to produce a saleable account, though
within this particular school-area, among families with
low SES, the reality is somehow different. Ingela
describes how she wishes to present their pre-school
activities:
“What is written will be grounded in play based language
learning, because this is a multi cultural area, … but
then what we wish should be written, it is … It is hardly
possible to have that kind of document. It is nothing
that will sell! But we don’t sell us either, because no
one will buy us, they just come here. That is how I look
upon it. But those who comes are very pleased, both
parents and children. But you don’t buy this place!”
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Some final words…
When Eva thinks of receivers of the accounts, she
refers to parents with other possibilities to make
choices than those Ingela and Sven meet
everyday.
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The discussions about the receivers of the quality account
documents illustrate on the practice level, what Stephen Ball
calls the “struggle over visibility” where ”tactics of transparency
produce a resistance of opacity, of elusivity; but that this
resistance is also paradoxical and disciplinary”.
Eva and her colleagues state that visualizing one’s failings is no
good publicity. Instead, in order to avoid such transparency, they
find detours to make the accounts more opaque. Paradoxically,
such ‘detour actions’ will at the same time be disciplinary, as the
preschool teachers adjust to the logic of performativity and
competition.
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Ingela’s story of difficulties to fill in the templates with her stuff
informs us about a pre-school that, through the templates, are
adjusted to the school leaders’ ideas of the ‘best practice’ and
designed for a specific group of parents.
It seems to be a less well functional market, a so called ‘quasimarket’ where some parents are able to make choices while
other neither choose pre-school nor bye the profile available for
sale.
Due to their everyday work with lots of children with special
needs, Ingela and Sven show us the impossibility to fully work in
accordance with the documents. Though, the presentations in
the planning documents looks like in any ordinary pre-school.
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These institutional narratives outline a picture of a quasi-market
where pre-school teachers - due to secrecy reasons – are unable
to tell what they are good at or describe their actual practice, but
rather stick to the templates and present a picture of a traditional
ordinary ‘best practice’ pre-school.
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