Abstract
This study examines preschool practitioners’ accounts of managing newly arrived children's double transition into rural preschools with little previous experience of migration. The narratives are analysed through Bakhtin's theory of dialogism. The analysis reveals that the practitioners at first found the migrant children's double transition troublesome and challenging. Eventually, they started to reflect critically on their own culturally endorsed beliefs and practices, and took a dialogical approach that helped them to adjust their practices to the needs of the newly arrived children. The results show that in order to support the inclusion of the migrant children, the practitioners themselves had to go through a process that included a change of mindset and a change of practice. Hence, to manage the children's double transition, the practitioners needed to make a dual adjustment.
Introduction
In Sweden, over 85% of children between one and five years old are enrolled in preschool education, which is the first step in the national education system (SFS , 2010; Swedish National Agency for Education, 2022a). Among children aged between three and five, the rate of enrolment is even higher, at around 95% (Swedish National Agency for Education, 2022a). Children who have migrated to Sweden have the same right to participate in preschool education as their local peers. Thus, for newly arrived children, preschool is their first encounter with a Swedish educational institution and with Swedish society.
Between 2010 and 2020, the proportion of children with a foreign background in Swedish educational institutions grew from 20% to 29% (Swedish National Agency for Education, 2022a, 2022b), and the preschool's role as an arena for integration has been strengthened (Lunneblad, 2017; 2022). However, very few studies have examined preschools’ work with the reception of migrant children, either in Sweden (Lunneblad, 2017) or in the rest of Europe (Bove and Sharmahd, 2020; Busch et al., 2018).
In this article, the term ‘newly arrived children’ is used interchangeably with ‘migrant children’. Both terms refer to children who have recently arrived in Sweden, and for whom both the cultural codes and the language are new. The term ‘inclusion’ (of the children) means giving newly arrived children the same opportunities to develop and learn as all the other children in an institution (Petriwskyj, 2014).
From earlier research, we know that newly arrived children who start preschool face additional challenges with regard to settling in compared to children with a majority background (Lazzari et al., 2020; Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, 2017). For any child, the transition from being cared for at home to participating in preschool education means that they encounter new people, new expectations and new routines (Dunlop and Fabian, 2006; Simonsson, 2015). For newly arrived children, the preschool context is also unfamiliar from a cultural and linguistic perspective. In preschool, migrant children may experience different behaviours, habits, modes of communication, expectations and food compared to their home environment. In addition, it may be the first time that they are exposed to a language other than their family’s language (Kalkman and Clark, 2017; Picchio and Mayer, 2019; Turunen and Perry, 2013). For this reason, it has been suggested that, when starting preschool, newly arrived children go through a ‘double transition’ (Picchio and Mayer, 2019: 293).
At the same time, previous studies have found that preschool practitioners are often unprepared to deal with the challenges that emerge when receiving migrant families in their preschools (Busch et al., 2018; Silva et al., 2020; Tobin, 2020). Research also shows that practitioners sometimes fail to recognize these children's struggles with decoding and comprehending habits and expectations within the preschool context (Picchio and Mayer, 2019; Kalkman and Clark, 2017). Hence, to ensure that practitioners are fully prepared to provide competent support to newly arrived children, we need to know more about what is at stake when receiving newly arrived children who are going through a double transition.
Previous research on migrant families’ encounters with the Swedish preschool has concentrated on how integration has been accomplished in multicultural urban areas where newly arrived children entered preschools characterized by linguistic and cultural diversity (Lunneblad, 2017; Ronström et al., 1995). In turn, the previous focus on urban areas is a consequence of the fact that, from the 1970s, most migrant families were offered or assigned housing on the outskirts of big cities (Björk-Willén et al., 2013x; Ehn, 1993; Ronström et al., 1995). Because of a change in Swedish reception policies and practices, the situation has altered. Since 2015, more and more migrant families have settled in rural areas (Statistics Sweden, 2020a, 2020b; Swedish National Agency for Education, 2018a), and their children have started preschool in contexts characterized by cultural and linguistic homogeneity.
The aim of this article is to shed light on preschool practitioners' accounts of handling migrant children's double transition to and inclusion in three rural preschools. This study contributes to previous research as it offers insights into how practitioners in monocultural contexts experience newly arrived children's double transition, and how they have changed their approaches and practices to meet the children's needs. Thus, it offers insights into processes of change that underpin the development of inclusionary practices. The insights gained are essential to better understand and support both practitioners’ and migrant children's experiences.
Previous research
This study is situated at the intersection of research on migrant children's transition between home and early childhood education and receiving and including newly arrived children in early childhood settings and practices.
In Sweden, the introduction period for all children begins with the child visiting a preschool together with their parent(s) for a couple of days. The aim is to introduce the child to the milieu and its routines and activities. Research shows that the main focus of practitioners during the introduction period is on building good relationships with children and their parents, and making children feel safe (Simonsson, 2015; Simonsson and Markström, 2013, 2017). Children's sense of safety is thought to create conditions for participating in pedagogical activities, since education and care in Sweden are seen as an inseparable whole – educare (Dahlberg and Moss, 2005).
Swedish preschool practice is generally highly structured; children are often grouped by age; and the most common activities are routinized (Markström, 2005; Swedish National Agency for Education, 2021). In preschools, children are socialized into society's values and views, which can be considered to create an ‘institutionally situated normality’ including unwritten rules for how preschool children are expected to act (Markström, 2005: 218). At the same time, preschool practitioners are expected to handle differences in sociocultural habits, beliefs and values among children and parents in order to facilitate the integration process (1997; Swedish National Agency for Education, 2018b).
With regard to the introduction of migrant children to preschool, previous research has shown that their double transition from home to preschool may cause emotional distress because they lack the opportunity to communicate with teachers and peers in their mother tongue (Hurley et al., 2011; Picchio and Mayer, 2019). In addition, migrant children often experience preschool practices, and the social and cultural codes embedded in these, as confusing and stressful because they diverge from their earlier experiences and home culture (Busch et al., 2018; Kalkman and Clark, 2017; Picchio and Mayer, 2019). These challenges are not always identified because migrant children may adopt a silent approach during their transition period, and this is why researchers call for practitioners to be more observant of migrant children's needs (Kalkman and Clark, 2017; Picchio and Mayer, 2019; Tang and Adams, 2010).
At the same time, researchers have emphasized that in order to facilitate migrant children's learning opportunities, preschools need to provide a nurturing, caring and needs-oriented environment (Busch et al., 2018; Lazzari et al., 2020). Other strategies that are valuable for children's inclusion include employing bicultural staff, who can enable communication between the children, their parents and teachers (Hurley et al., 2011; Lamb, 2020 ; Tobin, 2020), and organizing the preschool setting in such a way that everyday practices are clearly recognizable to the children (Lazzari et al., 2020; Picchio and Mayer, 2019). In addition, practitioners are encouraged to critically reflect on their practices, enter into dialogue with the children and their parents and take their perspectives into account (Lamb, 2020; Petriwskyj, 2014; Tobin, 2020; Van Laere and Vandenbroeck, 2017).
Theory
Giving migrant children the same opportunity to learn and develop as children with a majority background implies that their cultural and linguistic backgrounds are taken into account (Liu et al., 2020; Petriwskyj, 2014). Thus, at stake is how practitioners respond to these children's different and diverse needs (Penninx, 2019). For this reason, a dialogic stance that includes responsiveness among preschool practitioners can be considered a way to facilitate the inclusion of migrant children.
According to Bakhtin (1981), we all experience life from different perspectives, depending on factors such as past experiences, personal beliefs or sociocultural background. A dialogical stance opens up an interplay between different perspectives and views. A responsive understanding is where one recognizes the existence of multiple meanings and takes other people's perspectives into account. In contrast, a monologic understanding considers only the speaker's own perspectives and fails to take into account others’ perspectives (Bakhtin, 1984).
At the same time, adopting a dialogic stance may result in tensions between different values and needs (Hong et al., 2017). Of relevance to practitioners’ responsiveness may therefore be how they relate to the values, beliefs and practices rooted in the Swedish preschool's cultural and historical way of functioning. From a Bakhtinian perspective, these aspects of Swedish preschool practice can be understood as preschools’ ‘speech genres’ and as involving the ‘authoritative discourses’ that are prevalent there (Bakhtin, 1981, 1986). An authoritative discourse is a monologic discourse that imposes a definite way of thinking, speaking and acting based on an authority such as a tradition or accepted truths (Bakhtin, 1981). A speech genre can be understood as the embodied practices of a community or the communal order, which is ‘unreflectively lived according to [the] felt normativity’ of how to think and act (Cresswell and Baerveldt, 2011: 267; original emphasis).
To become reflexive with regard to one's involvement in a communal order, one needs to gain an ‘outside’ perspective of one's actions and beliefs (Bakhtin, 1990; Cresswell, 2012). This may happen when one experiences a breach with that order, as a result of someone acting in a different way than expected. In the same vein, an authoritative discourse can be questioned when one is exposed to different views that collide (dialogically) with each other. It may lead to the creation of an ‘internal persuasive discourse’ that differs from the authoritative discourse (Bakhtin, 1981).
Using Bakhtin's ideas in this analysis helps to identify accounts of responsivity (seen as a prerequisite for the children's inclusion) and eventual tensions between responsivity and the practitioners’ involvement in the preschools’ communal order and authoritative discourses.
Research context and methods
The study is based on focus group interviews with preschool practitioners in three rural preschools located in the same municipality in south-eastern Sweden. The three preschools were chosen because they reported that they had received newly arrived children.
In 2020 and 2021, nine focus group interviews were conducted with practitioners – three in each of the three preschools. During the first round of interviews, the practitioners in Preschools A and B stated that, prior to 2015, their preschools had received very few newly arrived children, but in 2015–2016 they had received several newly arrived children in each age group , which they found very challenging. There are no statistics on the exact inflow and outflow of newly arrived children in the preschools during 2015 and 2016. However, according to Statistics Sweden (2017), in 2017, Preschool A provided for 10 newly arrived children and Preschool B for 14. In contrast, the practitioners in Preschool C said that their preschool had only received a few newly arrived children during 2015 and 2016. However, they reported that, previously, the preschool had occasionally received newly arrived children but not several in the same group. In 2017, Preschool C provided for six newly arrived children (Statistics Sweden, 2017).
In addition to the differences in the nature of the influx of newly arrived children, the preschools differ in size: Preschool C accommodates approximately 150 children spread over 10 departments, while Preschools A and B each cater for 70 children spread over 5 departments.
The participating practitioners had different preconditions for receiving and including newly arrived children in their preschools and practices. The aim of the focus group interviews was to give the practitioners opportunities to narrate their personal and professional experiences, and to discuss their interpretations of events and processes with their colleagues, in order to gain in-depth knowledge of their experiences of handling diversity (Goss and Leinbach, 1996). The total number of focus group participants was 13, with each focus group involving between two and five practitioners working in different departments in the same preschool (Kitzinger, 1994). Eleven of the participants were university-trained preschool teachers, one was a university-trained social pedagogue and one was a childminder. All were female and had a Swedish background, and all but two had worked for over 10 years as preschool practitioners. The interviews lasted between 60 and 120 minutes and were video-recorded. All of the interviews were transcribed verbatim immediately after they had been conducted. The first round of interviews was conducted in each of the three participating preschools. The second and third rounds of interviews were conducted online owing to the situation caused by COVID-19 (Thunberg and Arnell, 2021).
In accordance with the guidelines of the Swedish Research Council (2017), the participating practitioners were informed about the advantages and risks of the study, that participation was voluntary, and that the research data would be treated as strictly confidential (Adler et al., 2019). Information about the study was provided for all of the participants and written consent was obtained. During the interviews, all informants were given pseudonyms to ensure their anonymity.
The first round of focus group interviews was introductory interviews about the practitioners’ experiences of the challenges and opportunities that had arisen due to receiving migrant families, and what approaches and strategies were used to handle the increased diversity. A preliminary analysis of these interviews revealed that the practitioners in Preschools A and B experienced a significant amount of change in terms of their perceptions, approaches and practices towards migrant children. This finding informed the questions for the second and third rounds of interviews, which were held three and nine months later, respectively.
The second round of interviews was based on a stimulus text that had been given to all of the participants in advance. The text was a shortened version of an ethnographic study focusing on integration in preschools in the 1980s (Ehn, 1993). The interview questions related to the stimulus text were used to guide the practitioners to interpret the experiences of integrating migrant families in suburban Swedish preschools in the 1980s and to compare them with their own experiences. The purpose of this procedure was to establish a common communicative ground for the interviews (Hydén and Bülow, 2003; Törrönen, 2002).
Before the third round of interviews, an email was sent to the participants asking them to reflect on ‘how the integration between the multilingual children and the Swedish-speaking children works’. They were also asked to ‘identify situations when you intervene (and how), and when you do not’. The aim was to create opportunities to discuss inclusion in terms of concrete situations that occurred in everyday practice.
In the first step of data analysis, the interview material was chunked into small units, depicting narratives, which were marked by codes (Leech and Onwuegbuzie, 2008). This was carried out with the help of a computer-assisted qualitative data analysis programme, MAXQDA. The codes depicted experiences related to: families entering the preschools; everyday challenges and how these were handled; changes in perceptions, approaches and practice; collaboration with parents; and accommodation of the children. Next, the coded narratives were organized into different categories in the search for themes. The most prominent theme identified was the integration of newly arrived families, which included the subtheme of inclusion of the children in preschool practices.
There were several threads relating to how the inclusion of the children was accomplished (or challenged). The most salient was the accounts of the practitioners’ struggles with children's transition to preschool, and their own processes to find ways to provide for the children's needs and to include the children in the preschool's everyday life. These accounts form the basis of the findings presented in this article. Finally, the accounts were analysed deductively using Bakhtin's dialogism theory and his ideas about responsivity, dialogic versus monologic understanding, speech genres and authoritative discourses.
Findings
The analysis reveals that, in Preschools A and B, supporting the children's double transition and inclusion posed challenges for the practitioners and led to processes of change in terms of their perceptions, approaches and practices. This, in turn, can be understood as the first step towards inclusionary practices in these preschools. In contrast, the practitioners in Preschool C did not experience challenges like those in Preschools A and B, or a corresponding process of change. One explanation for this difference may be that the practitioners in Preschool C did not identify the children's challenges with a double transition to the same extent as the practitioners in Preschools A and B.
The findings are presented as a process in three steps, illustrating the narrative pattern from Preschools A and B, and supplemented with a brief analysis of the narratives from Preschool C. First, the accounts about receiving the first children in 2015–2016 are explored under the heading ‘Bewilderment over the children's double transition’. Then, the narratives of change are presented under the heading ‘Coming to terms with children's double transition’. Finally, in ‘Closing the circle’, the threads of the analysis are pulled together.
Bewilderment over the children's double transition
The narratives from Preschools A and B reveal that the practitioners were bewildered over the challenges linked to migrant children's double transition. The accounts reveal that the challenges concerned, first and foremost, children who were older, who already communicated in their mother tongue and who had been culturally embedded in their home cultures. The narratives refer to the period when the children participated for the first time in preschool practice without their parents.
At the beginning, the practitioners struggled to balance a strong empathy for the children and a commitment to make them feel safe and include them in their practices, on the one hand, and their own sense of preschool ‘normality’, on the other. The practitioners reported that during their transition to preschool, the children were under great emotional stress and discomfort, which at times led to strong emotional outbursts. As one of the practitioners explained: ‘They did not know anything about our world, they did not know where they had ended up, and they spoke very little Swedish’ (Marie , Preschool A).
The practitioners in Preschools A and B all expressed that they felt powerless, and some of the narratives are burdened with self-blame over the fact that they lacked knowledge of how to approach these newly arrived children. Not being able to comfort the children verbally in their mother tongue and to explain what was going on around them was described as an especially troubling experience: At one point we received six children at the same time … you had to use a lot of body language and mimicking and … try to dare expose yourself … I tried to learn some phrases to be able to comfort the children – a challenge. (Kristina, Preschool B)
Their encounters with migrant children had left a profound impression on the practitioners: Yes, I remember when we had three siblings we had received, and I will never forget. I sat out here with two on my lap and they screamed. And I could not do more than convey my warmth towards them, like, ‘We are kind. We like you’. I still suffer from it. (Anne, Preschool A)
As these extracts indicate, the practitioners related to the children dialogically and empathized with their experiences. At the same time, they were not fully able to support the children's needs because of the language barrier, which caused emotional stress for both the children and the practitioners. In light of the fact that care is a central aspect in Swedish preschools, these experiences can be understood as a breakdown of the practitioners’ professional confidence. Thus, the practitioners’ lack of professional confidence was a response to the children's lack of feeling safe and secure.
The practitioners’ narratives from Preschools A and B reveal that, at first, they did not know how to approach the children and were confused when they noticed that their accustomed practices did not work because, as the following extract from Preschool A shows, the newly arrived children did not act as expected: Anne: I think we fumbled for a while and tried to put them [the newly arrived children] in our ‘Swedish’ box. Louise: Yes, definitely. Marie: And we were probably quite frustrated that they did not just somehow fall into the normal pattern … It did not work out. They did not eat; they thought our food was strange; they thought our routines were strange; they did not understand why we did certain things. It was so much we took for granted, which worked in the rest of the group but did not with these children – which is not so strange at all.
Second, the expressions ‘our “Swedish” box’ and ‘normal pattern’ bear witness to the practitioners’ boundness to the preschool's communal order, which was unreflectively lived in accordance to what they perceived as the ‘normal’ way to act and how practices should unfold (see Cresswell and Baerveldt's (2011) interpretation of Bakhtin's speech genres). Moreover, the practitioners’ initial frustration can be interpreted as a monologic understanding of the situation, as they did not fully take into account the children's lack of experience and knowledge about Swedish preschool practice. This is not surprising considering the unreflectiveness of following a community's communal order – that order is seldom questioned but is ‘lived as given’ (Cresswell and Baerveldt, 2011: 267). When the newly arrived children did not follow what was perceived by the practitioners as the preschool order, the children breached that order. In turn, that breach revealed the construction of preschool ‘normality’ (Cresswell, 2012). As Marie’s final line – ‘which is not so strange at all’ – suggests, the practitioners had changed their perception of the situation.
In Preschool C, the practitioners also recognized that the children faced differences between home and preschool (e.g. language, traditions and food) but these were not described as causing challenges like those noticed at Preschools A and B, either for the children or for the practitioners.
Coming to terms with the children's double transition
When asked how the newly arrived children adjusted to the preschool, the practitioners in Preschool C described that the children settled in well when they had learned the routines. In Preschools A and B, the practitioners made several connections between the children's progress and their own development. As one of the practitioners stated: ‘I think … what happens to the children is rooted in what happens to us’ (Anne, Preschool A). This quote reflects a dialogic stance and exemplifies that while coming to terms with the children's double transition, the practitioners in Preschools A and B moved from a monologic to a dialogic understanding of the situation. In turn, they increased their ability to react and actively respond to the needs of the children.
Salient in all of the narratives is that the practitioners believed that their primary task was to make the children feel safe and secure because supporting their basic needs was a prerequisite for everything else to function. To communicate with the children, they started to use pictures and digital language tools. In Preschools A and B, the practitioners reported that they had come to realize that in order to establish the children's sense of safety and help them settle in, they had to stay close to the children in every situation and guide them using body language: ‘What I can feel that you use … is yourself. So, you have to be involved in all situations. So, you almost have to turn yourself inside out … It requires a lot of you as a person’ (Sara, Preschool B).
The practitioners related that, eventually, language trainees were assigned to work in their preschools. The language trainees were newly arrived migrants who shared a common language with the newly arrived children. They were themselves learners of Swedish, and were assigned to the preschools as part of the process of integration into the Swedish labour market. The practitioners reported that with the help of the language trainees, they could find out about the children's wishes and preferences, and thus learn about what troubled them. In this way, they could figure out how to respond to the children's needs. In addition, the language trainees helped to ease the children's distress: There was a child who was so very sad, and then this language trainee came and just said a few words in Arabic, and the child just calmed down, like, ‘Huh, what ease, there is someone here who understands what I …’ … so, just passing by and saying a few words, and then it was just fine. (Emelie, Preschool A)
In addition, the accounts from Preschools A and B reveal that the language trainees enabled the practitioners to better include the children in educational projects, as the following reflection exemplifies: when you have access to a language trainee in the project who can take part of the children's previous experiences, which oneself cannot … So … to get access to the multilingual children's opinions and what they think … It has been a huge access to get this foundation to start from, and then to be able to move forward together. (Veronica, Preschool B)
The accounts from Preschools A and B also show that rethinking what the practitioners perceived as preschool ‘normality’ increased their responsiveness towards the children. There were no experiences of a corresponding change of mindset in the narratives from Preschool C.
One example of the practitioners rethinking their ‘normal’ expectations was when they at first misjudged the children's behaviours. They believed that the children were ‘ill-behaved’ during organized activities, since they did not pay attention to their instructions and just ‘ran around’ (Anne, Preschool A). When the practitioners realized that the children ‘did not understand what we were doing’ (Emelie, Preschool A), they took measures to clarify what they intended to do during organized activities so that it made sense to the children. This narrative can be understood in terms of the children breaching, and thus making explicit, the tacit communal order of the Swedish preschools’ ‘normalization practice’ (Markström, 2005). Hence, the experience facilitated the practitioners’ cultural reflexivity as they realized that their sense of preschool ‘normality’ was, in fact, a construction and not a universal norm. At the same time, they shifted from a monologic to a dialogic stance because they took the children's perspectives into account.
Other narratives show that the practitioners also started to question and abandon existing practices that did not fit the children's needs. One example of such an account is when one of the practitioners in Preschool A stated that, today, they ‘dare[d to] go against the culture at preschool’ (Anne). When I asked her to explain what she meant, she described the rigidity of the preschool's structures and routines, and that the newly arrived children's struggles with feeling comfortable had made the practitioners try to find new solutions ‘outside the box’ (Anne). To further explain these reflections, another of the practitioners (Marie) referred to a situation when the preschool received newly arrived siblings of different ages (two and four years). Following their ordinary way of doing things – placing children into groups based on age – the practitioners separated the siblings and placed them in two different groups. The siblings were devastated until one of them ran over to her sibling's group, and both children became calm. This, in turn, made the practitioners realize the necessity of prioritizing children's well-being and placing siblings together, regardless of their age. Thus, the routines were changed and the rigidity of the age groupings was relaxed.
This narrative is an account of how the children's needs collided with an authoritative discourse, which also constituted the communal order. In this case, a child's agency exposed the practitioners to an ‘outside’ perspective of their practices, which formed an internal persuasive discourse among the practitioners with regard to how to make vulnerable children safer, hence freeing themselves from the authoritative discourse of continually separating siblings into different age groups (Bakhtin, 1981).
In the same vein, the practitioners in Preschool B explained that they had detached themselves from their previous conviction to always follow a strict timetable of when certain things were supposed to happen during the day. They explained that this was a result of a ‘thought process’ (Kristina) related to increased reflexivity and confidence to question and change routines that they had previously taken for granted. They related this change to welcoming families from other cultures. Since they had to ‘constantly explain why you do things’ (Sara), they began to put words to what they did and why they did it. In turn, they ‘saw’ and could change practices that hindered inclusionary approaches. Hence, explaining their practices for ‘outsiders’ such as the migrant children increased the practitioners’ reflexivity and made room to adjust their practices to the needs of the children.
The experience of seeing things from an outsider perspective seems to have paved the way for an enhanced reflexivity and flexibility. The practitioners in Preschools A and B stated that, today, they could more easily change course from their planned activities or deviate from their routines in the everyday life of their preschool ‘if the children need it’ (Sara, Preschool B). This applied to both education and care situations. With regard to the children's well-being, one of the practitioners stated that if a child felt bad, they could now set aside the otherwise rigid timetable or their regular routines for mealtimes to put the child first: ‘if she [a child] feels bad eating in here, well, then we sit down somewhere else, or she can eat later or … it does not matter if they do not eat, as long as they are happy’ (Anne, Preschool A).
In sum, the accounts indicate that the practitioners had created an internal persuasive discourse about the necessity to generally act more freely in relation to authoritative discourses and the communal order prevailing in their preschools, in order to make room to respond to the growing diversity of needs among the children. Hence, becoming culturally reflexive and flexible in relation to accustomed practices and routines facilitated the children's inclusion in the preschools’ everyday life.
Closing the circle
When the practitioners in Preschools A and B described how they experienced receiving newly arrived children today, they all used similar expressions. They said that now ‘it is natural’ (Veronica, Preschool B) and ‘no big deal’ (Marie, Preschool A) to work with cultural and linguistic diversity in their preschools, since they have become ‘comfortable’ (Kristina, Preschool B) and ‘confident’ (all) with how to approach newly arrived children and their parents. These comments indicate not only that the practitioners experienced that they had increased their responsiveness towards the children and consequently their professional confidence, but also that they had constructed a ‘new’ preschool ‘normality’. Thus, according to their accounts, the practitioners had found a better balance between their commitment to make the children feel safe, and include them in their practices, and their sense of preschool ‘normality’. This transformation could be considered a basis for the development of inclusive practices rather than an end-destination for inclusion.
Discussion and conclusion
The accounts reveal that, in Preschools A and B, the practices and approaches used while managing ‘single transitions’ – for example, introducing children with a majority background – were not sufficient to come to terms with newly arrived children's double transition. The process of change that these practitioners reported was needed in order to succeed with the inclusion of migrant children was twofold: a change of mindset and a change of practice. Hence, to meet the children's double transition, the practitioners needed to make a ‘dual adjustment’.
In contrast, the practitioners in Preschool C did not report that they needed to make a dual adjustment. One explanation for the divergence in the results could be that, in Preschool C, the children's challenges in orienting themselves in their new setting may have gone ‘under the radar’. This could be attributed to the fact that Preschool C is twice as large as the other preschools and has only received a few newly arrived children from time to time. The fact that newly arrived children's efforts may go unnoticed by the practitioners or be overshadowed by the majority's way of acting and thinking has been confirmed by earlier research (Kalkman and Clark, 2017; Peleman et al., 2020; Picchio and Mayer, 2019; Tang and Adams, 2010). In Preschools A and B, however, there is reason to believe that the children's ‘voices’ were so loud that the practitioners had no choice but to enter into a dialogic relationship with them. In addition, Preschools A and B (but not C) were helped by multilingual staff to take the children's perspectives into account.
The implications for policy and practice are that preschool practitioners should enter into close dialogue with all migrant children, regardless of where they start their preschool career. Otherwise, they risk failing to identify these children's educational and care needs. In addition, practitioners should be made aware of the need for a dual adjustment to be able to support the inclusion of migrant children.
The results of this study demonstrate that taking newly arrived children's (outside) perspectives into account will help preschool practitioners to critically reflect on their culturally endorsed beliefs and practices at the same time as they become informed about how to adjust them to better fit these children's needs. The importance of reflexivity in relation to existing practices and the necessity to reconstruct them in accordance with the needs expressed by children is supported by previous research (Lazzari et al., 2020; Petriwskyj, 2014; Silva et al., 2020; Tobin, 2020).
The accounts show that supporting diverse needs within early childhood education is a challenge. Nevertheless, the results demonstrate that diversity makes possible multiple perspectives on beliefs and practices, which stimulates mental flexibility among practitioners and leads them to find solutions ‘outside the box’ (Kim-Bossard et al., 2019; Messetti and Dusi, 2015). This is a change of mindset that must be assumed to benefit all children, especially children who, in one way or another, are perceived as deviating from practitioners’ sense of preschool ‘normality’.
Footnotes
Declaration of conflicting interests
The author declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship and/or publication of this article.
Funding
The author received no financial support for the research, authorship and/or publication of this article.
