This participatory action research study draws attention to how fifteen preschool teachers develop didactic strategies by using video recording as a method for performing critical and didactic analyses. The overall aim is to develop didactic strategies and knowledge to support multilingual children’s emergent literacy development in Swedish preschools.
The starting point for a participatory action research, is action learning and a pragmatic orientation. The approach focuses on human development in an organization where action research is a tool for learning. This study employs a mixed-methods design where qualitative data were analyzed and derived from the preschool teachers’ written reflections related to their video-recorded activities and support of the analysis tool Social Language Environment-Domain, SLE-D (Norling, 2015a). The results show didactic strategies that are related to multilingual children’s interests, strategies that support multilingual children’s empowerment and strategies that challenge multilingual children’s reading and writing processes.
Continuing research suggests paying attention to the conditions of multilingual children in preschool education. This entails a long-term effort where action research engages preschool teachers to develop their beliefs into sustainable knowledge, in which video recording can serve as a method for preschool teachers to analyze multilingual strategies.