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.

This paper explores everyday nationalism in relation to work with traditions in Swedish preschools, as well as how preschool teachers reflect on these practices. One of the tasks of the Swedish preschools is to transmit and develop a cultural heritage. In Sweden, 95% of children aged 3-5 attend preschool. Approximately one fourth have a foreign background. Moreover, preschool children encounter very different cultural realities depending on where their preschool is located. Sweden is a secular as well as multi-religious country. This makes the cultural heritage that the preschools are supposed to transmit ambiguous and complex. Based on a survey where preschool practitioners answered questions about what traditions they pay attention to and what content they fill these traditions with, the article maps which traditions preschool practitioners actualize in their preschool practices. The data is analyzed and discussed in relation to everyday nationalism and the pedagogy of nation. The results show that the everyday nationalism of Swedish preschools both consolidates and challenges the traditions generally considered as being rooted in Swedish history. At the same time, many preschools integrate new traditions into their repertoire that represent societal changes, both in terms of cultural globalization and in terms of the traditions of religious minorities gaining greater visibility.

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.