Teaching in Programme in Early Childhood Education: Play, teacher training placement, degree projects, explorative learning, the history of education, science, Technology and Education for Sustainability, learning and development.

Key words

Early childhood Education; Conversation analysis; Ethnomethodology; Play; semiotic resources; Embodiment; Peer Culture; Sleep; toddler; Napping; Preschool History; Visual Analysis, historic film, historic photos, Archive, Visual Ethics, Visual methodology

A selection from Stockholm University publication database

• How to preserve the visible content of films in visual form throughout the analytical process?

  2021. Sofia Grunditz. Visual Studies 36 (1), 25-37

  Article

  This article demonstrates an analytical and arts-based approach using drawings as tools to retain the visual information in a film visual, throughout the research process as well as for thinking. The approach brings in methods and theory from disciplines using visual materials as data: Visual Anthropology, Ethnomethodology/Conversation Analysis (EMCA), Art History and Film Studies. Furthermore, tools and reflections on how to sketch, draw and construct analytical images using paper and pen, technical tools such as features in movie players and image processing software, and basic drawing apps on a tablet, are presented and demonstrated in empirical examples from a study on preschool naptime. The drawn analysis are abstractions of the visual data where certain visual aspects, visible in the film, are re-used thus creating a direct link between the film and the drawing that preserve visual aspects of the original throughout the research process. This gains new knowledge, further and different knowledge than just using words. Also, the drawings address ethical issues as children's right to anonymity in a study. The visual remake is proposed as a term for this arts-based approach to highlight, enhance and visualise the features of films that are of special interest to an enquiry and facilitate comparative analysis.

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• Boråsfotograf skildrar dåtidens förskola: Några barnkrubbeinteriörer. Anno 1935

  2022. Sofia Grunditz. Hjärnstorm (148-149), 96-105

  Article

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• Examining Children’s and Adults’ Ways of Looking in Kindergarten: An Analysis of Documented Observations from the 1930s

  2020. Anne-Li Lindgren, Sofia Grunditz. Documentation in Institutional Contexts of Early Childhood, 147-165

  Chapter

  There has been a long tradition of documenting activities in early educational settings. In this chapter, we analyse documentation from a preschool context in Sweden during the 1930s to explore the ways in which student teachers described children’s ways of looking. The Vienna-based child psychologist Elsa Köhler (1879–1940) was invited to the small town of Norrköping and stimulated the student teachers to perform this documentation. There are more than 370 handwritten documents preserved in the city archive. We use the children as the focal point of an analysis based on how student teachers documented what the children looked at and how they looked. This means that the results show the interaction between children and adults from a perspective that takes children’s actions as the starting point. The analysis shows how the children acknowledged the observing student teachers and trained teachers who were in the events observed, how children took an interest in the student teachers’ and teachers’ observing practices, and how the children tried out and performed similar practices. We want to stress the importance of including the children in the intricate web of social interaction that is enabled by this approach to analysis, and how it makes available unexpected descriptions of both children’s and adults’ looking practices in institutional settings in the past.

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• Vardagligt samspel och mobila sängar i barnstorlek – en visuell historisk analys av vilan i förskolan

  2019. Sofia Grunditz, Anne-Li Lindgren, Sofia Frankenberg. Educare (1), 116-142

  Article

  In previous historical studies on preschools, the main sources are texts; photos are used merely as illustrations. Inspired by the idea to use visual materials to study the look of the past by scrutinising historical photos and films of naptime in preschool, this article will shed light on preschool as an institution and on the materiality of naptime practices. The data comprise of historical photographs and films from the period 1900–1970 (in total 14 films and approximately 200 photographs that, in one way or the other, depict naptime: adult and child interaction, the beds' constructions, the material organization of rooms and naptime routines). By using visual analyses, visualizations and the notion of path dependence, the article shows how the everyday practice of napping was carried out in the historical preschool in relation to questions of continuity and change. The results suggest that the design of beds, as child-sized and easy to move and store, can be understood as defining the institution as a preschool with play and educational practices as its main purpose. At the same time, however, the beds themselves indicate that care, as sleep or napping, was an essential practice in historic preschools.

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• Vilan i förskolan 1910-2013

  2018. Sofia Grunditz (et al.).

  Thesis (Doc)

  The aim of this thesis is to explore preschool naptime during the period 1910–2013 through visual materials, films and photographs produced by different actors for various purposes at various historical times, and to develop a visual methodology that works with complex visual materials. Even though naptime is central to everyday life in preschool, it is an activity that is rarely a focus of Early Childhood Education research.  

  The empirical data derives from two separate but interrelated studies, the first a video ethnographic field study and the second an archival ethnographic study. Both studies include films and photographs that visualise the material environments and social interactions that take place during preschool naptime.

  A theoretical framework based on ethnomethodology, visual studies, childhood studies and the history of childhood studies is used. The concept the look of is a theoretical and analytical focus as the photographic image contains visual information about what things and actions look like. The look of children’s and adults’ participation in naptime, the material objects and the preschool environment are the focus when scrutinising the visual data of the study to gain knowledge about how embodied actions, along with the material and spatial design of the preschool environment, form practices at naptime. The thesis takes a post-positivist stance towards the photographic image.

  A transdisciplinary methodology, the visual remake, is developed for visual analysis and is used as a tool for comparisons, visualisation of results and reflection. A visual remake maintains the visual aspects of the data in order to keep them visible throughout the research process. It is a tool that visualises observable findings and conceptualises a reflection process through images, and not exclusively via the written word.

  The study provides knowledge about everyday life in preschool. The results show how the material and spatial organisation of the room and the participants’ embodied actions in this environment constitute naptime in both historical and contemporary preschools. There are recurrent patterns in the social interaction, as well as similarities in the design of the environment that are stable over time. These are the ways in which the participants use their bodies and interact through embodied interactions. The comparative visual analyses, focusing on continuity and change, suggest that some of these practices can be theorised as path-dependent. The present-day study shows that children constitute a peer culture within naptime, often through secondary adjustments to institutional and adult-structured order. Although the ideal naptime is visualised in the historical materials, it is possible to trace the same sort of naptime peer culture. There are features in the design of the beds used during preschool naptime that are typical of the preschool institution, and this design and the overall organisation of naptime have a path-dependence to ideals in the half-day preschools.

  Methodologically, the thesis expands our knowledge of how different visual materials can serve as sources in ECE research and how a research design focusing on the comparison of present-day and historical data opens up space for new research questions.

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• Små barns sociala liv på vilan

  2013. Sofia Grunditz (et al.).

  Thesis (Lic)

  This thesis examines how very young children (1-3 years) organize participation during naptime, a recurrent activity of everyday life in preschools. Focus is on how these children practice their social and cultural understandings of the local order and thus establish various local orders as part of how they shape their peer cultures and the routines of the naptime. An ethnomethodological and conversation analytic (EM/CA) perspective is used to explore the organisation of the local orders oriented to by the children in their participation during naptime. A special interest is directed at how small children use embodied actions and various semiotic resources as they actively take part in this preschool routine.

  The data, collected during fieldwork with participant observations, consist of video recordings and field notes. The recordings are analysed using EM/CA methods, including detailed attention to embodied features of interaction along with spatial and material arrangements. Transcriptions of interaction comprise representations of both verbal and visual aspects, e.g. gestures, gaze and movement through the room.

  The study shows that naptime involves more than sleep. It is demonstrated how very young children, through interaction with each other and the pedagogues, are active agents in sustaining, creating, re-creating and challenging the local orders of naptime. Through embodied actions and the use of various semiotic resources, the children are able to create time and space for their own peer cultures within this institutional routine. Overall, the study sheds light on the sophisticated ways in which very young children use their knowledge of cultural and institutional routines – the spatial organisation of sleep mattresses, artefacts (e.g. blankets, pacifiers and soft toys) and the sequential structures of the naptime – to constitute spaces for play and joyful interaction with peers and pedagogues. In spite of their sometimes limited vocal language, these very young children are able to use a variety of semiotic resources to constitute their own social life within naptime, often through secondary adjustments to institutional and adult structured order.

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• Elever ritar sig själva som framtida forskare

  2018. Anne-Li Lindgren, Sofia Grunditz.

  Report

  I augusti och september 2017 genomfördes en teckningstävling för skolklasser i hela Sverige på temat ”Rita dig själv som forskare. I den här rapporten analyseras teckningarna av professor Anne-Li Lindgren och doktorand Sofia Grunditz vid Barn- och ungdomsvetenskapliga institutionen vid Stockholms universitet.

  Tävlingen var en del av vetenskapsfestivalen ForskarFredag och samlade in 1 237 bilder från över 70 skolklasser med barn i åldrarna 6–12 år i hela Sverige. Tävlingen var inspirerad av en liknande teckningstävling som genomfördes år 2007.

  Anne-li Lindgren och Sofia Grunditz har lagt fokus på hur flickor respektive pojkar ritar, i vilken grad stereotypa föreställningar om forskare syns i bilderna och en översiktlig jämförelse med bilderna från 2007. De ger också råd till lärare om hur teckningsuppgifter kan användas som en del av undervisningen.

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Show all publications by Sofia Grunditz at Stockholm University