Educators’ interpretations of children’s belonging across borders: Thinking and talking with an image

Context of the study: Young children’s education in five European countries

Five European countries – Finland, Iceland, the Netherlands, Norway and Sweden – provided various contexts for the study, as their early education and care systems differ. A recent European report on educational systems shows that there are differences between countries in the government, access and integration of educational services for young children (Eurydice, 2019; also OECD, 2017). In the Nordic countries (Finland, Iceland, Norway and Sweden), childcare and early education are integrated, whereas in the Netherlands, there are separate childcare services for children aged under 4 years and educational services for children aged four and older. There are also differences regarding the ages at which children attend primary school. In Finland and Sweden, primary school begins at age of seven, but there is a pre-primary school phase before that. In Norway and Iceland, primary school begins at age six. In the Netherlands, primary school begins at age six, but education is compulsory from the age of five; pre-primary education for 4- and 5-years-olds is provided in schools (Eurydice, 2019; OECD, 2017).

The countries exhibit variations in their requirements for staff qualifications in early education. However, early education is usually conducted as teamwork; team members represent different professional groups, such as teachers, nurses and assistants. Typically, teachers are required to have the highest qualifications of the team members. In Iceland, they are required to have a master’s degree. In Finland, Sweden and Norway, they must have a bachelor’s degree. In the Netherlands, staff qualifications differ between settings for younger and older children (Eurydice, 2019; OECD, 2017).

Regardless of the different national contexts and educational systems, the principles of children’s participation, inclusion and belonging are embedded in educational policies in all participating countries. In the past few decades, there have been major international efforts to provide educational environments that are welcoming for all children regardless their ethnic and linguistic backgrounds or individual needs (Ainscow, 2020). Guo and Dalli (2016) note that ensuring children’s sense of belonging has become a worldwide curricular goal in early education.

Producing the image for the study

An illustrator was invited to provide an image for use by the study. As the first author is from Finland, a Finnish arts and education student was asked to collaborate with the research team for practical reasons. The Finnish research team informed the illustrator about the study and about how the image was to be used. Moreover, the researchers and the illustrator discussed previous research on children’s belonging in educational settings. For instance, multiple sources of children’s belonging were addressed, such as social relations, interactions, physical and material environment and educational practices (Juutinen, 2018; Sumsion and Wong, 2011). The illustrator’s task was to provide an image about an everyday life situation in an early education setting. It was highlighted that the image should be thought-provoking and contain different cues to the politics of belonging, including power, confrontation, tensions, positions and ethical and political values.

The first version of the image was discussed by the international research team. Researchers reflected on how relevant the image was from the perspective of their different contexts and commented on how to elaborate on it. The illustrator was asked to insert more diversity in the image, without falling into stereotypes. For instance, it was noted that there should be various cues to diverse children’s needs rather than one child in a wheelchair. The artist then composed an elaborated version of the image. The international research team agreed to use this version in all countries (Appendix 1).

Participants, early education settings and researchers

Each national research team recruited collaborative educational settings for the entire project. Participation was voluntary and the participants were able to withdraw at any point of the project. When planning the present sub-study, we agreed to use educators’ group discussions around the image from 10 educational settings, two settings from each country. The selection criterion was that the image had inspired lively discussion among educators in these settings. As is the case in high-quality interpretive studies, we attempted to produce rich and multi-vocal research material in which children’s belonging is approached from multiple angles (see Tracy, 2010).

Altogether, 38 educators from 10 early education settings participated in the study, serving as audiences for the image. In Finland, Norway, Sweden and Iceland, the educators worked with children under the school age, while in the Netherlands the educators worked in a primary school context with 4- to 5-years-old children. In interpretative studies, the participants’ and researchers’ backgrounds are noteworthy, as their capacities for interpreting the social world are framed by their prior experiences (Anderson-Levitt, 2012). As Table 1 shows, most educators were female and worked with children aged between 1 and 7 years representing diverse linguistic and ethnic backgrounds. There were also children with special needs in the groups. Hence, it is likely that the participants had encountered issues concerning inclusion and belonging in their daily work. With a few exceptions, the educators themselves represented the major linguistic and national backgrounds of their countries.

Table 1. Participants,a researchers and settings.

The study was implemented by an international, multidisciplinary research team consisting of five researchers, one from each country. Before the project, we had explored phenomena around children’s belonging in different disciplines: early childhood education, social sciences and occupational therapy. Combining different national and linguistic backgrounds enabled working both at national and international levels in the research process. On one hand, each researcher was able to communicate with the educators from their country with the educators’ own language, which helped to understand nuanced meanings. On the other hand, the international team provided opportunities for researchers from different contexts to look at the research material together, thus enriching the analysis and interpretation process.

Generating research material

The research material was generated through group discussions among educators using a semi-structured interview guide. The image was employed to inspire educators to think and talk with the image. In the beginning of the group discussions, the educators were asked to look at the image and freely narrate what they saw in it. After that, themes from the interview guide were discussed. The themes for the group discussions were drawn from previous research on belonging (e.g. Juutinen, 2018; Sumsion and Wong, 2011); the purpose was to address children’s belonging from multiple angles, such as individual children, social relationships, material environment, paedagogical practices, power relations, tensions, dilemmas and conflicts. However, we did not restrict the discussions to issues that were directly connected to these themes. We attempted to create an informal atmosphere wherein the educators were able to freely reflect on their views and share ideas about children’s belonging. The researchers’ role was to inspire and challenge educators’ discussions, ask clarifying questions and ask educators to exemplify the issues they were addressing. During the discussions, the educators often referred to the image and compared their own practices with what they saw in it. Each group discussion lasted around 1 hour. The discussions were recorded and transcribed. Altogether, the material consists of 285 pages of written text (Table 2).

Table 2. Research material.

Analysis

The analysis proceeded through several phases and included interpreting the research material at national and international levels. First, we read the material produced in our own countries to familiarise ourselves with the contents and identify those parts of the discussions that are connected to the image. During the second phase, we conducted an inductive, data-driven analysis in each country with the parts of the group discussions that were connected with the image. The analysis focussed on the contents of the discussions; that is, what the educators talked about, and how they talked about it, when looking at the image. When discussing preliminary notions from the nation-level analyses in the international research team, we found that educators in all countries drew attention to the following themes regarding the image: people, physical and social environment, practices, emotions and interactions. Additionally, educators in all countries reflected on what they found familiar or strange in the image compared to their own contexts.

While the first and second phase occurred at the national level, the third phase proceeded at the international level. The researchers in each country identified excerpts from the research material regarding the aforementioned themes and translated them into English. This enabled us to read and interpret the material across national and linguistic borders. During this phase, the international research team worked together to analyse the translated excerpts in light of Yuval-Davis’s (2011) three dimensions of belonging: social locations; identifications and emotional attachments; and ethical and political values. This framework helped us to analyse the educators’ interpretations from various angles: how educators categorised people in the image into different social locations; how they developed emotionally loaded narratives about who the people in the image were; and how they valued and judged the matters they saw in the image.

Children’s belonging: Categorising people in educational settings

Categorising people emerged as a significant part of educators’ interpretations of the image. It was interesting how similarly educators produced the categories in their talk regardless of their national backgrounds, and how widely they took these categories for granted. The categorising seemed to be an un-reflective process in which the educators read cues embedded in the image and differentiated people within it, thus shaping these people’s belonging to particular social locations.

As revealed by the excerpts below, the educators categorised people in the image according to their gender (girl, boy, woman, man, mother) and generation (child, adult). The adults were further divided into the categories of professionals (teachers) and parents (mother). Identifying someone as a teacher shows how the educators connected the image to the institutional context of education. These categories thus illustrate the educators’ understanding of the social milieu within which children’s belonging is shaped in early education settings.

Even though the educators categorised the people in the image in a similar way, there were differences in how they connected these categories to their own context. The Dutch educators said that they never work with such young children, which reflects their educational system, wherein childcare services and education are provided separately. The Nordic educators did not address children’s ages as unfamiliar. Another example of differences concerns the person sitting on a bench in the image. The educators most often interpreted that person as a mother. However, there were differences even within one country in how educators viewed parents’ roles in educational settings. For instance, one Finnish educator expressed that parents must be invited to participate in the daily lives of educational settings, whereas another educator stated that the parents’ role is neither to observe nor to participate in activities.

Throughout the group discussions, the educators characterised the child group in the image as diverse. When thinking and talking with the image, educators in all countries drew attention to ethnic and cultural differences as well as children’s individual (special) needs as differentiating aspects within the group. Like the Finnish and Icelandic educators cited below, the educators connected certain bodily features and material cues, such as skin colour, clothes, black glasses and a wheelchair, to children’s backgrounds and needs.Moreover, the educators tended to look at the group more from the perspective of differences than similarities.

The educators’ interpretations showed implicit assumptions about what was seen as normal and deviant in early education settings. Belonging to ethnic and cultural minorities was seen as an aspect differentiating a child from others. Similarly, there seemed to be assumptions about how normal children develop, what kinds of abilities they have and which children deviate from this norm.

When talking about specific social locations, such as belonging to ‘foreigners’ or ‘children with individual needs’, the educators not only referred to certain societal structures, but tended to attach meanings to those categories. For instance, they made assumptions about the characteristics, lifestyle and actions of children with minority backgrounds or individual needs. In the excerpts above, the Dutch educator connects the category of autism with difficulties in social relations, and the category of Muslim with specific dietary restrictions.

Children’s belonging: Identifications and emotional attachments

The educators connected children’s belonging to physical closeness, togetherness and joint activities with peers, and emphasised joy and happiness as prerequisites for children’s belonging. They developed imagined narratives of who the people in the image were, how they experienced the situation and what kinds of emotional bonds and interactions existed between them. The educators reflected on the children’s body language and facial expressions and saw a variety of emotions, such as unhappiness, loneliness, discomfort, upset, anger, excitement, happiness and satisfaction. They addressed three emotionally loaded interactions in the image that have significance for children’s belonging: opposing, joint play and being alone.

In all group discussions, the educators drew attention to the interactions where children seemed to be opposed to other children or adults. These children were physically close to other people but, emotionally, there seemed to be something that broke down the communion. The educators interpreted that these children were raging or quarrelling. The educators referred to two details in the image. First, they addressed a child who sat on an adult’s lap on the floor (Figure 1). The educators speculated about the adult’s behaviour and supposed that the child might be showing rage, aggression or anger and needed comfort. In the excerpts below, the Swedish and Icelandic educators interpret holding, controlling and comforting as an adult’s reactions to the child’s emotions and actions.

Second, the educators noticed two children and an adult sitting by a table (Figure 2). According to the educators’ interpretations, these children’s interactions were coloured by quarrelling, and the educators characterised the children as feeling angry and being upset. The educators acknowledged that one of the children was crying and called her ‘a crying girl’. Some educators interpreted that the teddy bear might be a reason for the children’s quarrelling. A closer look at the educators’ language showed that they employed verbal expressions that referred to children’s separateness rather than to belonging. As the excerpts below illustrate, ‘the crying girl’ and ‘the other one’ were seen as opposing each other.

A different emotional atmosphere appeared from the educators’ group discussions when they drew attention to two children who were playing with balls in the image (Figure 3). The educators seemed to similarly interpret that the children enjoyed the joint playing and were joyful, satisfied and happy. The educators interpreted that an adult’s response to the children’s jubilation was to control, discipline and silence the children. As the excerpts from Sweden and Norway show, the educators used the personal pronoun ‘they’ when addressing these two children, thus connecting the children in a companionship.

Being engaged in joint activities emerged as significant for children’s belonging in the educators’ interpretations. Therefore, the persons who were not engaged in joint activities received much attention. For example, the educators talked a lot about a person who was lying on the floor and reading a book (Figure 4). The educators interpreted that the person reading was a child – more specifically, a boy – thus locating the person in specific categories of age, gender and generation. Aside from categorising, the educators interpreted various emotions and experiences in the child’s image. This child was characterised as being lonely, which is a significant notion with regards to belonging.

Figure 1. ‘A raging child’.

Picture: Sara Ojala.

Figure 2. ‘Quarrelling children’.

Picture: Sara Ojala.

Figure 3. ‘The happy children’.

Picture: Sara Ojala.

Figure 4. ‘The lonely boy’.

Picture: Sara Ojala.

However, the educators had different interpretations of how this ‘lonely boy’ experienced the situation. The Finnish and Icelandic educators thought the child looked unhappy or disturbed, whereas the Norwegian educator interpreted the child’s emotional expressions more positively.

The educators discussed whether being alone was the child’s own choice or a punishment for what happened before the situation. Being alone in the highly social environment of institutional early education emerged as a tense matter. On one hand, the educators recognised that a child would need some private space for resting and having a quiet moment amidst the daily heat of being in a group. On the other hand, there seemed to be implicit expectations that children need to be involved in joint activities. From the latter viewpoint, being alone in a social situation was a potential indication of one’s exclusion and a threat to one’s belonging.

Children’s belonging: Values, judgements and tensions

The educators’ discussions around the image were value-laden; they did not address the image in a neutral way but, rather, judged, criticised and appreciated matters they saw in it. The educators emphasised issues that connect to democratic values, such as diversity, participation, equality and equity. As noted by the Swedish educator below, a diverse early education environment can provide children with opportunities for learning to encounter and live with different people. The Finnish educator, in turn, noted the pictures on the wall and the many languages depicted in the image. The educators viewed utilising the material environment as an appropriate means for inclusion; they noted that diverse children’s belonging and feeling at home can be promoted through different material items, symbols and languages.

We found tensions in the educators’ discussions regarding how to embody democratic values and how to promote children’s belonging in the daily lives of early education settings. The educators described how children’s agency and their opportunities to influence their actions clashed with the adults’ authority and the rules of the setting. As shown in previous sections, joint play involved the potential for promoting children’s togetherness but also for causing noise that disturbs other children and especially adults. Throughout the group discussions, the educators pointed out the adults whose actions they interpreted as controlling and disciplining, thus referring to the asymmetric power relation between children and adults. A harmonious early education environment was highly appreciated by the educators. The following excerpt from Sweden illustrates how the educators criticised the image’s messy atmosphere and suggested how the activities could be better organised.

The educators discussed how children’s equity was realised and how different children, as part of a diverse group, might experience the situation depicted in the image. The educators’ interpretations showed that the diversity of children demands individualised support from educators, and they doubted whether the children with individual needs received enough support. For instance, in the following excerpts, the Icelandic and Norwegian educators question how ‘the blind boy’ might experience participating in a circle time where the joint activity is to look at a book.

The excerpts from this section provide examples of the micro-political tensions shaping children’s belonging in institutional educational settings, namely tensions between children’s agency and the institutional conditions of early education settings; between individuals and groups of children; and between diversity and equity. On one hand, the educators viewed that gathering children with different backgrounds and needs into the same group offers a potential space for everyday democracy by enabling children to encounter differences in their daily lives. On the other hand, the educators considered that mere physical presence does not guarantee children’s experiences of inclusion, belonging or equity. They recognised that not all illustrated children had equal opportunities for participating in and enjoying the joint activities.

To make an un-reflective categorisation reflective

This study contributes to educational research and practice by explicating educators’ taken-for-granted and un-reflected categorisations, thus portraying educators’ views about the social milieu within which children’s belonging is shaped in educational settings. One of the most striking notions of this study was that educators in all countries drew attention to ethnic and cultural differences as well as children’s individual (special) needs as differentiating aspects within the group of children. In addition, the educators categorised people according to their ages, genders, generations and positions within institutional education. Previous research has argued that categorising people is an automatic part of humans’ ability to navigate the complex social world (Rosenberger and Stöckl, 2018). However, there is an increasing body of research that problematises the inevitability and normality of stable social categories. Rosenberger and Stöckl (2018), for instance, point out how immigrant background is not only a structural category but also a category of self- and other-identification. Yuval-Davis (2006: 201) emphasises that the categories of belonging are neither natural nor neutral but, rather, a product of human creative freedom and autonomy: ‘Rainbows include the whole spectrum of different colours, but how many colours we distinguish depends on our specific social and linguistic milieu’. Our findings challenge educators to reflect on their views about social categories and on how children’s belonging is both promoted and hindered by categorisation in educational settings. By becoming conscious of the power relations implicit in the categories, educators might be able to take further steps towards practices that support all children’s belonging (see Phillips, 2010). The need to support children’s belonging is an urgent challenge that educators confront in increasingly diverse educational communities and in a highly mobile world (Healy and Richardson, 2017; Zabeli and Gjelaj, 2020).

Emotionally loaded interactions and children’s belonging

The study provides insights into educators’ views about emotionally loaded interactions that are significant to children’s belonging in educational settings. The educators tightly connected children’s emotions of joy and happiness with physical closeness, togetherness and involvement with others. This strengthens previous research that has shown how togetherness is created in joint activities and evolves gradually through joint play, stable friendships and emotional bonding (Hännikäinen, 2007; Johansson, 2017; Koivula and Hännikäinen, 2017). The educators also addressed opposing and quarrelling as situations in which children experience anger, rage, aggression and being upset. These emotional interactions break children’s communion with others and influence their belonging, at least momentarily. It is important to note that being a constant collision course with adults or other children can become a severe threat to children’s belonging. Some children tend to be typecast as trouble-makers, which affects their peer relations, status and belonging in a group of children (Puroila, 2019). Our findings also raise the question of how to relate to children’s solitude, as being alone appeared as a potential threat to belonging in the educators’ interpretations. There seem to be cultural expectations that children should be involved in joint activities: being socially active and extroverted is more desirable of children than being introverted and preferring solitary activities. Belonging to a group can thus be viewed as both a right and an obligation. A child has the right to be included but is also expected to include others and contribute to the public good in the educational institution (see Emilson, 2008). Notions of children’s emotionally loaded interactions challenge educators to acknowledge their roles in responding to children’s emotions, supporting emotional bonds among children and creating the overall emotional atmosphere in the educational setting as significant aspects of children’s belonging. As Ree and Emilson (2020) note, educators’ way of communication is meaningful for children’s participation and belonging in a community.

Diversity as a resource for democracy

Moreover, our study challenges educators to critically reflect on values and practices related to diversity and belonging in education settings. Values, ideologies and power relations are, according to Yuval-Davis (2011), embedded in the politics of belonging. Democratic ideals seemed to be at the forefront for the educators, who emphasised the value of diversity. Even though the educators regarded diversity as a resource for everyday democracy in early education, there were tensions between diversity and equity in their interpretations. Diversity was highlighted as a democratic prerequisite, but the educators questioned whether it was possible for the illustrated children with special needs to experience equity and belonging in the group. This notion leads to the challenging question of equality in relation to equity; two different strategies for supporting fairness. Does promoting children’s belonging require that all children are treated in similar ways, which relates to the idea of equality? Or should each child be provided with opportunities that best meet their individual needs, which relates to the idea of equity (also Terhart and von Dewitz, 2018)? Positive attitudes towards diversity can be regarded as a politically correct rhetoric for a conscious educator. On the other hand, early education institutions have a long tradition of inclusive ideology shaped in practice. However, the new social realities in Europe and around the world, characterised by increasing diversity, mobility and pluralism, are challenging for both educators and children in early education institutions (García-Sánchez and Nazimova, 2017; Urban, 2015). In these institutions, children and adults with different cultural, political and social backgrounds meet which may cause tensions between different values, ideologies and power positions (Puroila et al., 2016). A crucial point for educators is to manage to work in a respectful and ethically sensitive way with diverse children and families and simultaneously honouring their own values (Purdue et al., 2009).

Researching with an image in cross-cultural research: Methodological reflections

Thinking and talking with an image was developed as a methodological approach for this study to explore educators’ interpretations across national and linguistic borders. This methodology has potential use in future research, but limitations must also be acknowledged. From the educators’ perspective, the image created a common space for them to share ideas and experiences in their discussions. The image also provided a means for lowering or transgressing the professional borders between the educators and the researchers (also Puroila and Johansson, 2018); when talking about the image, the educators were in their own territory, which was more or less distant from the researchers’ daily lives. Even though all educators had a right to look at the image from their own vantage points, it is most probable that the educators tended to adapt to the research situation and present themselves as competent professionals. Some educators might also have experienced group discussion as a limitation in terms of expressing intimate ideas and interpretations for colleagues. For us researchers, the educators’ discussions with the image provided a window into their cultural knowledge and values concerning children’s belonging in institutional early education. As Bleiker (2015) states, the interpretation of images contains values that have more to do with the interpreter’s values than the content of the image itself. Collaboration within the international and multidisciplinary research team allowed us to approach children’s belonging from various perspectives. On one hand, our different backgrounds enabled us to communicate with participants from various countries; as ‘insiders’, we had an opportunity to gain nuanced understandings of what the educators in each country were expressing (see McNess et al., 2015). On the other hand, the different backgrounds provided distance and ‘outsiderness’ (see McNess et al., 2015) and obliged us to cross borders between nations, languages and professions. Combining the insider and outsider perspectives appeared a fruitful means of deepening our understanding of children’s belonging in the context of cross-cultural research.

Professionalism as a shared basis for promoting children’s belonging in the European context

As this study draws on a micro-political perspective to children’s belonging (Karlsson, 2019; Kelchtermans and Vanassche, 2017), it is beyond its scope to articulate macro-level conclusions about similarities and differences among the five European countries. However, some similarities and differences in the micro-politics of educational settings can be identified. One interesting finding was that educators from different countries had much in common in their interpretations of children’s belonging in early education settings. The educators in all participating countries recognised familiar features of daily life in an educational setting in the image. The discussions around the image contained professional language and references to routines that are thoroughly familiar to educators working with young children, such as gathering children into circle time or employing visual schedules. The participants recognised these familiar features in the image because they have been socialised into the professional cultures of early education. Besides recognising familiarities, the educators addressed what they felt was strange and also were critical of what they saw. The differences in the educators’ interpretations did not follow national borders but there were different interpretations within one country. In general, the shared basis of the profession appeared as a more significant basis for educators’ interpretations than the different societal contexts did (also Anderson-Levitt, 2012; Puroila and Johansson, 2018). This does not mean that the national-level differences or their significance to children’s belonging should be denied. Rather, the study suggests that there are enough common features in educators’ professionalism in different European countries to collaborate in promoting children’s belonging. We propose that, in the European context, dialogue across borders provides a potential means for educators and researchers to co-construct knowledge and learn from each other. Deepening understanding of the shared professional core of early education emerges as a crucial challenge for future research. A shared understanding of early education enables educators, researchers and policy-makers to promote common European values based on democracy by developing early education settings that support all children’s belonging.