Travelling Texts. Justifying Early Intervention.

Building on ideals of social equality and a welfare system promoting equal opportunities, there has been an increasing awareness in the kindergarten sector in Norway of kindergarten employees’ responsibility to identify children at risk and to initiate early intervention. When kindergarten employees talk about children they are worried about, they tend to refer to their “gut feeling”. Indeed, a terminology for worries seems to be lacking. Consequently, different educational programs have been initiated to enhance kindergarten employees’ knowledge about various risk factors and to increase interdisciplinary collaboration to find suitable interventions. The process from identification to intervention involves a complex chain of actions in which documentation is at stake. In this paper I follow this process, departing from the standpoint of kindergarten employees, particularly highlighting how texts are integrated in the chain of actions and how individuals enter into the text-reader conversation. The texts often serve to justify intervention from agents outside of the kindergarten. Acknowledging the “power of the written word” kindergarten employees need to find ways to articulate their gut feeling, e.g. by documenting their observations. In doing so, they build on existing terms and categories and implicitly (re)construct “children at risk”, “children with learning difficulties”, “children with delayed motor development” etc. Like Ian Hacking warns, there is a risk herein of “looping effects”, in which certain people are ‘made up’ and the categories making them up reinforced.