Is There an “I” in “We?” – Children as Individuals or Group Subjects in School-Age Educare Staff’s Collegial Conversations

Abstract

The aim of this study is to gain knowledge of how School-Age EduCare (SAEC) staff in and through collegial conversations construe a child/children. Collegial conversations with two SAEC staff teams were analyzed using the theoretical concepts from the fields of discourse analysis and systemic functional grammar. The results show that children were repeatedly construed as a group subject by the staff and more rarely as individual subjects. The SAEC staff construed the children as group subjects in four different ways: as general groups, as pre-determined groups, as quantity-related groups, and as behavior-related groups. The children who were construed as individual subjects were mainly the ones who diverged from the group, often in negative ways.