Studentship and negotiations of higher education in preschol teacher education

This project is interested in narratives of studentship and higher education in preschool teacher education in Sweden.

The project emanates from an interest in the effects of studentship within a higher education promoting widening recruitment and participation and an increasingly diverse body of students.

With a special focus on pre-school teacher education, a profession-oriented education program that can be said to respond well to the assignment of coming to terms with social imbalance in recruitment to higher education, the present study aims to deepen knowledge of how different student subjectivities, academic and professional institutional identities take shape as well as negotiations of higher education per se.

The study is mainly informed by narrative theory and method.

Through life story interviews with focus on the students’ education-related background, an anchor is laid for a series of follow-up interviews during their entire time as students.

Thus, the preschool teacher student is, by employing Althusser’s concept, interpellated here for an ongoing narrative about studentship, higher education, related to their own background and aims towards a future professional life.

In a discourse analytical approach, the students´ narratives are also contextualised with how they are interpellated as student on formal occasions for student directed information by higher education institutions and how notions of diversity and the figure “student” appear in policy texts.