Antagonism and conflict in the Swedish preschools documentation and evaluation assignment : A discourse theoretical study about the evaluation of the preschools actitivity and the teachers positioning in relation to that task

The aim of this study was to investigate how the position of the preschool teacher could come across in interviews with six teachers about their assignment to document and evaluate the preschool activity. The research done so far in this area shows that it can be a complex and difficult part of the preschool teachers work. A dilemma often described is how the teachers can be able to analyze and document the children´s learning with the aim to evaluate and develop the preschool activity without judging and mapping the children. A special focus of the study was to see how the methods and dsicourses described by the teachers possibly could affect the teachers´s position in the area of documentation and evaluation. To analyze the empirical data Ernesto Laclau (1935-2014) & Chantal Mouffe´s discourse theory was used, a prespective witch also figured to be the theoretical foundation of the master thesis. The result of the study showed that the teachers often described themselves in a position between conflicting discourses. This was most apparent in relation to what seems to be a rather new material, focusing on mapping the individual children´s abilities. It could be interpreted that this material and the positioning of the preschool teacher in relation to it, is a part of a trend that has been described by other researchers, where an Anglo-Saxon evaluation tradition with focus on the individual rather than the preschool as a whole is spreading