Situated Pedagogy in Danish Daycare – The Politics of Everyday Life.

This article analyzes the possibilities and obstacles in pedagogical practices in ECEC in relation to developing relevant opportunities for participation for all children, by supporting their own en-gagements in order to expand their action possibilities. Throughout the last decades, the political agendas in the Nordic as well as other OECD countries have been led by an increasing focus on learning goals and standardized professional procedures at the expense of a more situated flexible pedagogy following children’s own engagements. When concerns arise about children’s well-being, development, and/or learning, this tendency seems to intensify, as descriptions of concerns are often based on assessments of children's individual (dis-)abilities while investiga-tions of children’s own engagements and reasons for actions are seldom conducted. From a theoretical standpoint in critical psychology and social practice theory, we discuss collaborative processes among children and adults in institutional conditions as inherently political, in the sense that the distribution of different access to social resources and opportunities of participation for different children is negotiated through such daily exchanges and therefore also involves questions about democracy. We explore everyday life practices of children and professionals an-alyzing how they through everyday practice constantly work on both maintaining, reproducing, and transgressing the standardized demands. To understand such processes, we suggest a con-ceptual focus on politics of everyday life and situated pedagogy.