Uenighet som demokratisk praksis i måltidsfellesskapet på småbarnsavdeling

Children’s participation and democracy are concepts in need of being discussed from several angles in the setting of early childhood education. This paper is based on empirical materials from seven research conversations with four groups of staff in Norwegian nurseries. The conversations keep a focus on the social dimension of the meals in nursery. The purpose of the paper is to explore how different discourses in the conversations construct episodes where either adults or children, as participants in a meal challenge and break the structures of the meal community. Using concepts from the theory of the Radical Democracy, the paper discusses how two discourses in the conversations can make different conditions for conflicts as democratic processes during meals in nurseries