In my project I will use critical discourse analysis of written sources to answer my research questions about what happened with Friedrich Fröbel's ideas in Scandinavian kindergarten tradition and the focus on mathematics in early childhood. Critical discourse analysis is a vigorous assessment of what is meant when language is used to describe or explain (Weinstein, 2007). A discourse can broadly be defined as the various ways people can achieve communication (Fairclough, 2007).
A critical discourse analysis examines the form, structure and content of discourse, from its creation to its reception and interpretation by a wider audience (Weinstein, 2007). Discourse analysis is a wide area, but has two central components that have been widely agreed upon:
a) discursive practices, events and texts, and (b) wider social and cultural structures, relations and processes. The aim is to find out how those practices, events and texts arise from an ideology, how they are shaped by relations of power and struggles for power (Fairclough, 1995).
In my project I will look closer at the texts, the language and communication within their social context. I will identify different ideologies that dominates (or not) at a certain point in time in society, and how these have influenced the view of mathematics in early childhood education and care. I will continue to develop my framework of analysis, based on Fairclough's theories of critical discourse analysis of textual analysis.