The Provotype as a methodological exploration in educational research

ABSTRACT Preschool, understood as being both a physical and psychological environment, is, according to objectives in national curriculum, required to be inclusive for all those who attend it. Previous studies have identified the stereotypical norms of several everyday activities of preschools, including both interactions and premises. The aim of this article is to present and discuss a possible methodological idea of a ‘provotype’ as a model for re-representing empirical analysis based on different data types that are combined in a research process. Research concerning provotypes will be presented. The research method will be presented in detail and the analytical process described. In the results section, the provotype and its aspects will be presented. Both during the work with the provotype as well as afterwards we have learned that working with the ‘provotyping’ (what we like to call the whole process of analysing the results, visualizing, discussing the form of it and our reactions to the provotype) involves several phases of exproration and those phases includes uncertainty. A provotype might be a good way of re-illustrating, or as we put it re-representing, results from case studies with a number of different data, as in this study.