Rum som talar, rum som speglar : En studie av förskolans inomhusmiljö som bärare av diskurser om barn och lärande

The main focus of this empirical study has been to examine how the physical environment is staged in two different pre-schools within the district of Stockholm, Sweden. We have tried to interpret what ideas and discourses of children and learning that lay behind the environmental staging. And how the environmental staging preconditions pre-school children’s learning and how it enables them to act within the environment. We have investigated and documented all of the space, material and toys that the children have access to in each pre-school. The documentation constitutes of notes and photographs that have been organized in to categorical schemes to help us go through and analyzes the material. For this study we have chosen a post- structuralism theory perspective and discourse analyzes. We argue that the environment can be read as text, that we can find different discourses of how children and learning are perceived in how the environment is staged. We have researched what rooms, what material and what documentation children in the pre-school environment have access to and do not have access to. We examined in what way the environment speaks of children’s agency and their influence. Key terms for this study are physical environment, material, subject, body, power, individual and collective. In the study we argue that different theoretical view points are needed to understand the wide dimension that is the physical environment and how it is perceived and organized. Throughout this study we refer to the theoretical stand points of post-structuralism and Michel Foucault´s concept of power and govern mentality, Karen Barad´s inter-active theory and Maurice Merleau-Ponty´s view of the body and the world. After analyzing the material the result of this study shows that the environment in pre-schools are stage through ideas and discourses of what children need to learn and what the they need to have access to. We found that the current Curriculum for the Swedish pre-school and its goals referring to "learning and development" that are closely linked with school subjects has had significant influences on how the environment is staged. Our result shows that different "learning subjects" and play are separated from one and other and that the environment does not speak of a multidisciplinary learning. It was also made visible to us that care has been made secondary in how the environment is organized. Most rooms speak of a strong control and adaptation of children’s body’s. We found that the materials where organized in a strict way with strong codes for how they should be used. The conclusion of this study is that the environment is strictly planed and organized, by the teachers. The environment positions the body and speaks to the subject on how it should act and how it should view it´s subjectivity. The current group of children has little influence over how the environment is staged. The environment is staged after current discourses and norms of what children are, what they should do and what they should learn. These discourses within the environment inflict on both children and adults within the pre-school and set up boundaries for meaning- making and for what is perceived as possible within the environment