Discursive Norms and Incentives for Equipping Students with Religion and Worldview Literacy in Swedish Preschool Teacher Education Policy

Abstract

The increasing societal diversity of religions and worldviews (R&W) in Swedish preschools affects what competencies today’s preschool teachers need and what needs to be taught in Swedish Preschool Teacher Education (PTE). The study aims to investigate the content and discursive norms regarding religion and worldviews in Swedish PTEs on a national policy level and contribute to knowledge in the research field of Religious Studies and Higher Education. The PTE curricula of all the twenty Higher Education institutions offering PTE in Sweden in 2022 are investigated using text-centred discourse analysis, together with a theoretical and analytical tool for analyzing different dimensions of the PTEs and the potential for them to function as socially sustainable communities of care. The results show that even though there might be implicit incentives for teaching about R&W, all but one of the educational curricula of the twenty PTEs in Sweden lack explicit mention of ‘religion’. Based on the results, we can see that at a national policy level, the content of the educational curricula reproduces liberal secular and humanist worldviews as norms for the PTEs. There is also a lack of explicit policy-related incentives for the PTEs to promote social sustainability regarding equipping students with proper knowledge and skills for developing care-centered and norm-critical R&W literacy.