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Municipalities use of digital systems when documenting special educational needs in early childhood education
Umeå University, Faculty of Social Sciences, Department of applied educational science.ORCID iD: 0000-0002-4192-9225
2023 (English)In: 31st EECERA annual conference. Children’s curiosity, agency and participation: challenges for professional action and development: Conference proceedings. Book of abstracts, 2023, p. 225-225Conference paper, Oral presentation with published abstract (Refereed)
Abstract [en]

This study focuses on how actors at the municipality level justify the use of digital systems for documenting special educationalneeds (SEN) in early childhood education (ECE). Digital systems are increasingly replacing the paper-based documentation in ECE (Cowan & Flewitt, 2021). However, little is known about if and how SEN documentation is included in these digital systems. Addressing that gap, this study investigates the occurrence of, and rationales for, digital SEN documentation in Swedishmunicipalities. Drawing on Argyris and Schön (1996), I view digital systems as environments for organisational knowledge. In this environment, templates and accesses create organisational maps that professionals must navigate. The study was conducted within the interpretive paradigm. First, I investigated if, and what, digital systems that were used for SEN documentation in all 290 municipalities in Sweden. Next, I interviewed a total of 18 key informants from six municipalities. A thematic approach was used to analyse the interviews (Cohen et. al 2011). Participants gave their written informed consent before the interviews. Data was anonymised and followed the ethical guidelines of the Swedish Research Council (SRC, 2017). The preliminary findings show that informants mainly use ‘security’ and ‘legislation’ as rationales for using digital systems. Moreover, it seems that the organisational maps created by the digital systems, outline how SEN documentation should be conducted, whereas the question of what to document is left to ECE professionals. The findings highlight a gap between what ECE professionals need and what the digital systems offer when it comes to SEN documentation. 

Place, publisher, year, edition, pages
2023. p. 225-225
Keywords [en]
Documentation, Digital system, Special educational needs, Municipalities, Organisational knowledge
National Category
Pedagogical Work
Research subject
educational work
Identifiers
URN: urn:nbn:se:umu:diva-214170OAI: oai:DiVA.org:umu-214170DiVA, id: diva2:1850793
Conference
31st EECERA annual conference, Lisbon, Portugal, August 30 -September 2, 2023
Available from: 2024-04-11 Created: 2024-04-11 Last updated: 2024-04-11Bibliographically approved

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Vretblom, Hanna

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CiteExportLink to record
Permanent link

Direct link
Cite
Citation style
  • apa
  • ieee
  • vancouver
  • Other style
More styles
Language
  • de-DE
  • en-GB
  • en-US
  • fi-FI
  • nn-NO
  • nn-NB
  • sv-SE
  • Other locale
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Output format
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  • text
  • asciidoc
  • rtf