Teacher-Parent Relations and Professional strategies: A Case Study on Documentation and Talk about Documentation in a Swedish Preschool

Abstract

THE ARTICLE IS FRAMED by a project designed to study the teacher profession in a current Swedish preschool through work on systematic documentation of quality. Questions deal with how teachers handle the demands on visibility, how they perform and what aspects of the teaching profession will be exposed and what parts will be silenced.

This article examines documentation directed towards parents in one public preschool setting over a school year. Apart from weekly parental letters, the data consisted of observations from a staff meeting focusing on teachers' talk while producing the yearly quality account (QA), the content of the final written QA and a follow-up interview. In this case, the requirement of involving the parents in the work on systematic documentation is a traditional but recently clearly expressed policy in the Swedish Education Act. Analysis is based on theories of education policy and how the policy needs to be handled in the local context by the teachers, and theories on the teacher profession and professionalism. The results show that professional strategies like keeping distance vs. keeping closeness are connected to teacher–parent relations such as trust and mate relations. Teacher–parent relations as emotional were found in talks about documentation, and professional strategies to obscure and neutralise were found in relation to the QA.