This study is part of a larger project with the general aim of developing the ability of preschool practitioners to reflect critically on their practice related to children's grief and questions about death. The article is based on six focus-group interviews and a workshop during which preschool practitioners reflected on and worked with a national crisis management tool: the crisis box. Through the theory of didactic transposition the analysis sheds light on how death education and crisis management related to death in Swedish early childhood education represents a disconnect between the practitioners' discomfort with teaching about biologic death and the children's need of comfort and understanding of what biologic death entails. The realization of this disconnect prompted the practitioners to consider developing a child-friendly didactic tool that would better support children's emotional processing and that could also be used for proactive death education. Our findings indicate that early childhood educators are in need of training in how to teach about the biological facts of human death in terms of universality, irreversibility, nonfunctionality, causality, and noncorporeal continuation. Only this way can educators be equipped with the knowledge, skills, and confidence to engage in open and age-appropriate conversations with children about biologic death, fostering a supportive and safe environment for them to express their feelings and ask questions.

Swedish preschool education is, by law, non-confessional. Yet, it is also an educational context within which most children aged 1-5 encounter traditions that carry Christian connotations. This paper explores how two Swedish preschools maintain a balance between keeping education non-confessional and paying attention to the traditions that are associated with the preparation for and celebration of Christmas - Advent. The data consist of ten videotaped observations from two preschools. The data was thematised with the help of Ninian Smarts dimensions of religious and secular worldviews. This way, we could show that the different traditions the two preschools were engaged in during the four weeks before Christmas contributed to a banal reproduction of a holiday season with roots in Lutheran Christianity. At the same time, the preschools contributed to a (re)production of traditions that evoke a national imaginery. Our results show that Advent in Swedish preschools is characterised as a non-confessional task for the institution. Thus, the principle of non-confessionality lives side by side with a banal national religion. Thereby, the Swedish preschool plays an integral part in the banal reproduction of a Swedishness that includes Lutheran Christianity.

According to the Swedish Preschool Curriculum, one of the tasks of the preschool is to pass on a cultural heritage, its values, traditions and history, language and knowledge, from one generation to the next. The formulation indicates that cultural heritage plays an important role in defining the tasks of preschool teachers as far as the transmission of cultural norms is concerned.

The aim of the overall study was to explore how Swedish preschool teachers implement and reflect on the task of transmitting a cultural heritage. This paper has its focus on how a particular cultural tradition, Easter, is celebrated in two preschools.

The empirical data consists of 227 min video data from two preschools. The video data were analysed through qualitative content analysis with a focus on how different semiotic resources, actions and artefacts are used to perform Easter.

The different modes of enacting traditions are used as instruments of socialisation into a cultural heritage as well as means of actualisation of a preschool pedagogy. While preschool teachers can be seen as agents of change who challenge some of the ways of celebrating a tradition, they are also agents of national reproduction. Thus, the teachers both enact the curriculum and build a bricolage of elements, some of which represent continuity, while others represent change.

dag uppmärksammas en rad traditioner i den svenska förskolan: halloween, lucia, jul, alla hjärtans dag och många andra. Hela tiden utmanas de rådande traditionerna av nya och de nya lever sida vid sida med de mer etablerade. 

Enligt läroplanen ska förskolan överföra och utveckla ett kulturarv som handlar om värden, traditioner, historia, språk och kunskap. I de traditioner som anses vara äldre svenska traditioner ingår även religion. När barn i förskolan undervisas i och om traditioner skapas det därmed också möjligheter att ge barnen kunskaper om och av religion. Läroplanen ger dock ingen vägledning exakt om vad som ska förmedlas när det gäller exempelvis traditioner. Så hur kan man göra?

I Traditionernas didaktik ger författarna flera konkreta och inspirerande exempel på hur förskolepedagogerna kan uppfylla uppdraget att ge kunskap till och utveckla barns intresse för vad som pågår i det samhälle de växer upp i. Boken ger en inblick i vilka traditioner som uppmärksammas; vilka högtider som firas, samt hur relationen mellan kulturarv, tradition och religion hanteras i den svenska förskolan.

Bokens redaktörer är Tünde Puskás, biträdande professor i pedagogiskt arbete och Anita Andersson, lektor i samhälle och kultur i ett skolperspektiv, samt. Båda vid Linköpings universitet.Övriga författare är Polly Björk-Willén, biträdande professor emerita i pedagogiskt arbete vid Linköpings universitet och Eva Reimers, professor i pedagogiskt arbete vid Göteborgs universitet.