Announcement of doctoral theses

This article-based thesis offers a study of how the increasing policy emphasis on children’s school readiness shapes early childhood education and care (ECEC) teachers’ work with children aged between 0 and 6 years. In four articles, I examine how Norwegian and Danish ECEC teachers both challenge and comply with the ruling constructs of school readiness by drawing on various and at times conflicting institutional discourses in their interactions with children, colleagues, parents, municipal authorities, and school representatives. The data for the studies consist of detail-rich transcripts of individual and group interviews with 22 ECEC teachers, describing their work of supporting and assessing the language development of children from minority-language backgrounds. These are coupled with a systematic configurative research review of the existing empirical studies on ECEC teachers’ perceptions of school readiness.