Umeå University's logo

Principals are important actors in enacting national educational policy, so it is important to elicit their views of curricular change. Thus, this study explores Early childhood education and care (ECEC) principals’ perspectives of a new ECEC curriculum and its interpretation in a Swedish municipality. Using a contextual lens with cultural, structural and material filters, I examine the principals’ views of the reformulated curriculum and an Implementation Project that the municipality organized to provide support. Empirically, it is based on non-participant observations of group discussions and activities that were parts of the implementation project and in-depth interviews with 16 principals who participated in the project. The findings reveal a positive set of attitudes towards the new curriculum and the concept of ‘teaching’ it has introduced, both as highly valued ideas and for the increase in status it will bring to preschools. At the same time, the principals recognize that it also introduces challenges for preschool education and professional staff associated with complex webs of interactions between actors, activities, contextual factors and new concepts. Although the principals view the municipality’s support very positively, they raise concerns about its organization and timing. The findings have important implications for future support initiatives of municipalities.

This article explores preschool principals’ leadership agency when enacting a new curriculum, looking at how they perform their role, how they organise their work and what challenges they face in the process. Drawing on the concept of agency, this case study focuses on the principals’ positions, practices, opportunities and limitations as well as their construction of agentic leadership. The data collection consists of in-depth, semi-structured interviews with 16 preschool principals working in a large Swedish municipality. The analysis of the material has taken place through thematic coding and interpreted through the lens of agency; the results show how the cultural, structural and material aspects of each preschool influence the enactment of the curriculum and shape the principals’ agentic capacity. Both time and context provide a framework for these principals’ enactments of a new curriculum within the specificities of their particular preschools and their own ambitions for the future. The principals’ discursive positionings are both filtered through these aspects and constructed on the basis of values and ideas about their own role and the role of staff. In addition, they underpin how the principals describe themselves as leaders and how they view their opportunities to act in an agentic manner.

Detta kapitel handlar om hur, med vilket innehåll och med vilka resurser en ny läroplan för förskolan iscensätts av kommunala tjänstemän i arbetet med rektorerna i en svensk kommun. Studien genomförs som en fallstudie med intervjuer och observationer. Genom ett policy enactmentperspektiv i enlighet med Braun, Ball, Maguire och Hoskins analyseras olika kontextuella dimensioner i studien: situerad, extern, professionell och materiell kontext. Resultatet visar värdet av att kunna använda en redan inarbetad organisation med regelbundna träffar med samtliga kommunala rektorer för förskolan. Förändringar i förskolans nya läroplan tas emot positivt av de kommunala tjänstemännen, och Skolverket framstår som den externa kontext som de visar stor tilltro till. Tjänstemännens egen professionserfarenhet från iscensättande av tidigare läroplaner ligger till grund för att de nu vill borga för likvärdighet mellan förskolor genom att ge samma information och material till samtliga rektorer. I detta arbete utgår de från arbetssätt och en del material som tillhandahålls av Skolverket. Det läroplansinnehåll som framför allt framställs som grundläggande och särskilt utmanande i studien är undervisning och förskollärares utökade pedagogiska ansvar. Genom ingående och praxisnära studier över tid bidrar detta kapitel till forskningsfältet i pedagogiskt arbete med kunskap om huvudmannanivån i förskolan.