Pernille Juhl’s research while affiliated with Roskilde University and other places

This article focuses on a Danish study of an early childhood intervention that targets young minority ethnic children and their parents. The intervention, termed ‘mandatory learning programme’ is an example of current European policies that endeavour to support young children's learning as key to enhancing their future school performance and fighting inequality and marginalisation. This study employs document analysis and ethnographic methods to examine the political representations of the problems targeted by the intervention and to investigate how the intervention affects parents' everyday lives. The findings reveal that the parents involved in the intervention find it challenging to maintain their engagement in education and work; hence concluding, the intervention risks enhancing exclusion from society, despite its aim to prevent exactly that.

Artiklen handler om interventionen ’obligatorisk læringstilbud’. Formålet med artiklen er dels at undersøge de politiske problemforståelser, der ligger til grund for interventionen, dels at undersøge hvordan interventionen får betydning i forældres hverdagsliv. Artiklen er baseret på empirisk materiale i form af kvalitative interviews med to forældrepar og to pædagoger samt observationer fra tre eftermiddage i det forældreforløb, der er en del af interventionen. I artiklen inddrages desuden danske policytekster om ’obligatorisk læringstilbud’. Artiklen viser, hvordan interventionen, som har til formål at forebygge parallelsamfund og øge deltagelse i samfundet, i praksis betyder, at de involverede forældre får sværere ved at bevare deres tilknytning til uddannelse og arbejdsmarked. English abstract Mandatory Learning Program – Problem Representations and Parents’ Perspectives The article deals with the intervention “mandatory learning program.” The purpose is partly to examine the political understandings of the issues underlying the intervention and partly to investigate how the intervention affects parents’ everyday lives. The article is based on empirical material in the form of qualitative interviews with two sets of parents and two pedagogues, as well as observations from three sessions in the parental program that is part of the intervention. The article demonstrates how parents involved in the intervention find it more challenging to maintain their connection to education and the job market.

Forskning som organiseres i tæt samarbejde med deltagerne, og som foregår i hverdagslivets kontekster, stiller forskeren over for flere etiske dilemmaer undervejs i forskningsprocessen. Overvejelser knyttet til fx informeret samtykke, dataopbevaring og -behandling og anonymiseringsspørgsmål er vigtige aspekter af forskningsetik, men adresserer kun nogle af de etiske spørgsmål, der kan opstå i forskning. Desuden er disse mere standardiserede og procedurebaserede aspekter af etik, som ofte fylder mest i opstarten af et forskningsprojekt, i mange tilfælde ikke tilstrækkelige som retningslinjer, når man som forsker skal foretage konkrete vurderinger og træffe beslutninger om etiske udfordringer på forskellige tidspunkter i forskningsprocessen. Etiske dilemmaer udspringer netop af situationer, hvor forskeren er i tvivl og bliver usikker på, hvad der er den rigtige beslutning og/eller oplever modstridende følelser eller handlemuligheder. Etiske spørgsmål opstår hele vejen gennem forskningsprocessen; fra man formulerer forskningsspørgsmålet, indleder sit empiriske arbejde, forlader feltet, og til man laver sine analyser og publicerer dem. I artiklen diskuterer vi etiske fordringer, der kan guide sådanne refleksions- og beslutningsprocesser gennem forskningsprocessen. Etiske fordringer er på én gang nogle overordnede etiske forpligtelser, man påtager sig at arbejde med i sin forskning og samtidig forankret i det konkrete forskningsprojekts metodologi, teoretiske afsæt, samt det felt og de problemstillinger, man arbejder med. I artiklen diskuterer vi, hvordan etiske fordringer kan bidrage til at reflektere og håndtere etiske dilemmaer gennem forskningsprocessen. Vi trækker på eksempler fra to forskningsprojekter om børn og forældres hverdagsliv, der på forskellige måder har involveret etiske dilemmaer i forskningssamarbejdet. Nøgleord: Situeret etik, Etiske dilemmaer, Etiske fordringer, Praksisforskning, Medforsker

I denne artikel viser vi, hvordan det daglige samarbejde mellem pædagogisk personale og forældre præges af stigende institutionalisering af forældreansvar, og af at arbejdsdelingen mellem daginstitution og familie ændrer sig. Artiklens analyser bygger på empirisk materiale fra to forskningsprojekter i danske daginstitutioner. Projekterne har haft henholdsvis pædagogers og forældres perspektiver på samarbejdet om børns tidlige læring i fokus. I denne artikel sætter vi primært fokus på forældrenes perspektiver og inddrager kun i mindre omfang pædagogernes perspektiver. Teoretisk tager vi afsæt i en forståelse af familien som social praksis forbundet til andre praksisser og i forlængelse heraf en forståelse af forældreskab som et fænomen, der udspiller sig i og formes i mødet med omsorgsgivere andre steder – fx i daginstitutionen. Analytisk bruger vi begrebet grænsesøgning til at sætte fokus på, hvad forældre og pædagoger hver især gør for at håndtere samarbejdet mellem familie og daginstitution i hverdagens møder, og hvordan arbejds- og ansvarsfordeling forhandles.

Early learning agendas are currently being introduced in early childhood education and care (ECEC) by transnational organizations such as the EU and OECD. In this paper, we focus on Denmark, where such agendas interweave with a pedagogical tradition emphasizing a child-centered approach and children’s play. Based on ethnographic research, we explore learning agendas as part of practice in ECEC centers, pursuing the situated meanings of a learning program as part of everyday practice in ECEC centers from three different perspectives: of children, professionals and managers. Informed by psychological and anthropological traditions, this design employs an agentic stance and conceptualizes children, professionals and managers as subjects actively contributing to the co-creation, transformation and translation of policies in everyday contexts. Key findings suggest that the appropriation of national and international learning agendas in ECEC settings characterized by local traditions is an ambiguous process. On the one hand, the learning program’s structure can support existing professional practices and traditions. On the other hand, the program’s focus on learning goals and evaluation practices reduces the focus on pedagogy and supports administrative and political logics, which in turn marginalizes important knowledge about children and their engagements.

In this article, we discuss the situated ethics of researching the everyday lives of children and families. Research conducted in close collaboration with research participants in everyday contexts presents the researcher with multiple ethical dilemmas involving doubts, uncertainties, and often also discomfort, conflicting emotions, and contradictory possibilities for action. However, the literature on ethics often focuses primarily on standardized procedures, such as for obtaining informed consent, preventing harm, and ensuring anonymity. Although such procedures provide an important foundation for reflections on ethics, they only address some of the ethical concerns in research. Furthermore, they often fall short in terms of guiding the researcher to make decisions when encountering ethical challenges in concrete situations at various stages of the research process: from entering to leaving research sites. We suggest formulating specific ethical commitments that are grounded in a given research project’s methodological approach and concrete conditions. Furthermore, we analyze the interconnections between ethical commitments, theoretical stances, and research ambitions, and how these interconnections may guide reflection and decisions on how to handle ethical dilemmas throughout the research process. We draw on examples from our research on the everyday lives of children and parents, using social practice theory and collaborative research as jumping-off points.

This article argues that the latest Danish Early Childhood Education and Care (ECEC) Act has direct implications for the ways in which parents and professionals collaborate about children. The Act introduces a learning agenda that installs an asymmetrical distribution of tasks, which, we argue, may subsequently cause asymmetrical relations between parents and professionals. This asymmetry poses a threat to the shared care arrangement, which has historically characterized the welfare states of Scandinavia. We analyze how the new conditions for collaboration between parents and professionals, stipulated in the recent ECEC Act, are translated and transformed into local polices and everyday practices. In addition to reporting ethnographic research done in two ECEC centers, we analyze how recent policy shifts have implications for the daily collaboration between parents and professionals. We show how the learning agenda marginalizes parents’ perspectives in the collaboration between families and ECEC centers. Our discussion of the consequences emphasizes that possibilities for collaborating on shared care are left unused and that this may contribute to an instrumentalization of familial relations.

This article theoretically refines the rendering of a conceptual framework suitable for including preverbal subjects, i.e., infants, in research. It is argued that the theoretical framework “psychology from the standpoint of the subject” is useful, as its conceptualization of the human–world relationship is a dialectical one that emphasizes how children are active subjects in their own lives. Nevertheless, key concepts such as subjective reasons for action and first-person perspective, do not sufficiently encompass bodily and emotional activity. The article discusses the framework’s inadequacies and, by extension, proposes the notion of Befindlichkeit, a German word translated here as embodied orientation, as a key concept that allows the inclusion of infants and toddlers as co-researchers. Befindlichkeit contributes to the analysis of the human–world relationship by situating bodily and emotional activities in processes of orientating in social practice.

This chapter presents an analysis of parents’ perspectives on good parenthood when subject to interventions from the Danish Child Protection Services. It is based on a qualitative, empirical data. The aim is to explore how parents process instructions from professionals regarding, for example, their child’s health and daily routines, and what such instructions mean to parents in their daily lives. The professionals’ instructions are analysed as intertwined with the complex everyday life of the children and parents. Parenthood is conceptualised as a social practice, embedded in societal structures. This means that it is the daily parental activities in the home and daily tasks in relation to supporting children’s participation in other life contexts (e.g. day care) that are explored and analysed.