Examining children’s and adults’ ways of looking in kindergarten: An analysis of documented observations from the 1930s

Abstract

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.