Sammendrag
This ethnographic study seeks insight into some of the complexities of the socialisation process, hereby understood as a dialectical process including both adaption and resistance. A central aim is to visualise children as active actors in this process in the context of the Norwegian day-care centre. At the same time, it is also acknowledged that children, as a social category, are interwoven in a network of power relations and structures where adults take part in an everyday process of cultural domination.Through an interdisciplinary approach combining an actor (child) perspective, a cultural perspective and a conflict-/power perspective, the socialisation concept and relevant perspectives are discussed.Six months of fieldwork was carried out in two day-care centres.Participant observation was the main methodological strategy, but open interviews with the staff were also comleted. On the one hand,the children's interest, priorities and cultural practices were focused. On the other hand, one was looking for demands and expectations communicated to the children through adult practices and structural features. Some substantial issues for the cultural analytical approach were selected: Social and physical space, material objects and symbolic fictional figures. Female adults, for the most part, transmit cultural and educational practices in Norwegian day-care centres. This was taken into account as gender became clearly important through the analytical work. In order to describe and understand socialisation as a process of adaption and resistance the main focus was on the meeting points between the two "levels": The children (child - child interaction) and the everyday life in the day-care centre as it was managed by the staff. In accordance with the intention of visualising children's agency in the socialisation process, resistance is foregrounded in the analyses.
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