Ruth Ingrid Skoglund

The purpose of this study was to gain insight into kindergarten principals’ and parents’ understanding of bullying and how they experience cooperating against it. In-depth interviews with three kindergarten principals and six parents in Norway were completed, and the material was analysed in light of Honneth’s theory of recognition and infringement. The principals and parents agree that bullying is a social exclusion process. At the same time, they associate bullying with characteristics of the individual, and they view the children’s experiences of bullying differently. The principals and parents experience challenges in their cooperation against bullying. In particular, the obligation of confidentiality is considered an obstacle.

This chapter describes and discusses the Norwegian steering documents for ECE sector and teacher education. As they in the recent years focused on the concepts of understanding and collaboration when talking about parents/caregivers in ECE, a historical perspective on the changing objects, focus, and range of the understanding and the collaboration is presented. Next, regulations on individual and collective forms of parental involvement are described, and followed by analysis of guidelines for teacher education, which shows which aspects of collaboration and understanding with parents are supposed to appear during teacher education. The research on parental involvement is presented with focus on national parental survey in which parents from all kindergartens in Norway participate. Even the average parent is satisfied with his/her child’s kindergarten and gives it 4.3 out of five points; we try to reconstruct an un-average perspective on the services. Our conclusions suggest deeper clarification of the collaboration and understanding to avoid biased implementation of them. Moreover, we suggest full publication of parental survey so that not only average scores are available.

Research on educational activities generally focuses on the importance of positive emotions in the interaction between teachers and children. This article will focus on the challenging emotions that can arise when kindergarten staff interact with the children. The empirical material has been collected from a qualitative study of conflicts between children and between children and the staff in four Norwegian kindergartens. The focus of the article is limited to children’s resistance in conflict situations with staff. The data material is based on the staff’s written narratives about their practice and focus-group interviews where they discuss their emotions and actions in events where children demonstrate resistance. The authors discuss how challenging emotions arise in everyday life in kindergarten, reasons for these emotions and how they may affect the development of professional judgment.

For several years, there was resistance to the use of the concept of bullying in Norwegian kindergartens and to labelling individual children as bullies or victims – as exhibiting certain characteristics or lacking certain skills. This chapter investigates a theoretical framework beyond the perception of bullying as being as resulting from individual factors. An alternative approach is the democratic theoretical perspective, in which children are considered as explorers of complex, dynamic relations, which can lead to their inclusion or exclusion. The research questions are: How can children’s bullying in free play be seen as explorations in inclusion and exclusion processes? How are children’s explorations of social processes during free play supported or restricted by institutional practice? Children’s exploration of their own and others’ changing positions and power in a group are seen as part of their democratic and cultural formation. Hedegaard’s model for child development (Chap. 2) provides possibilities for analysing children’s exploration of social processes at a relational, institutional and societal level. An illustrative example is an observation protocol regarding three boys in an outdoor free-play setting. The boys explore their positions and how material and physical factors affect their access to power, resulting in internal exclusion of one of the boys. It is difficult to detect inclusion and exclusion processes because of their simultaneity: they co-occur in a way that does not result in the total exclusion of either. The cultural value of outdoor free play expects children to be self-directed and provides them with possibilities to hide their exploration of inclusion and exclusion processes, ensuring a lack of involvement from practitioners. (I use the term practitioners for all employees working with children in Norwegian early education institutions, named kindergartens. These employees consist of formally educated kindergarten teachers as well as skilled workers and assistants with no formal education at the university level).