Omsorgssvikt - Barnehagen som forebyggende og avdekkende arena. En kvalitativ innholdsanalyse av pensumlitteratur på barnehagelærerutdanningen

Abstract

Kindergarten is an institution most children attend to and spend lot of time in during their first years of childhood. Those who work in kindergarten have an unique opportunity to identify children who are victim of neglect. However, research has often pointed out that professionals lack the competence needed to identify cases of neglect. In order to be able to help children in challenging life situations, students who will work at kindergartens should be provided with the competence to uncover and prevent neglect, so that they confidently can act when needed. This thesis aims to explore how the kindergarten education curriculum prepares the students to identify and prevent neglect. The thesis has a social constructionist perspective and a qualitative approach, using qualitative content analysis and thematic analysis of parts of the curriculum of kindergarten educations in Norway. Research has been performed on 19 kindergarten education programs in total. Analysis showed 51 books with relevant content for research questions divided on 19 education programs. From these we have identified five main categories that repeat themselves in the syllabus: Neglect, children position, professional intervention in situations of neglect, interdisciplinary collaboration, and theories. These are the themes that the results essentially can be divided into. The framework of the thesis is the social ecological model of Bronfenbrenner. Across the curriculum of all institutions, neglect is presented with a focus on the microlevel. The findings show a large variation between different kindergarten education programs, which makes it difficult to generalize and challenging to draw any conclusions regarding to how the curriculum on theme neglect is. The different education program vary in their emphasis on the theme and the approach. This shows room for improvement if the goal is that the different education programs should have the same approach and emphasis on theme neglect in the curriculum.