"We must also educate the parents..."

Class and ethnic dimensions of kindergarten inclusion

Abstract

This article investigates the role of inclusion in kindergarten education through qualitative interviews with kindergarten teachers and parents. Drawing on the sociological work of Zsuzsa Ferge, we examine how kindergarten institutions contribute to the reproduction of social boundaries along ethnic and class lines. Our analysis focuses on how inclusion is understood and enacted in everyday pedagogical practice, and how institutional narratives and routines participate in shaping distinctions between social groups. Complementing Norbert Elias’s theory about the process of civilization, Bourdieu’s concept of symbolic violence provides a central analytical lens to reveal the subtle and often invisible mechanisms through which power operates in early childhood education. As a second interpretive framework, Michael Lipsky’s notion of street-level bureaucracy enables us to distinguish between the formal, colourblind discourse of “integration” and the more personal, often contradictory, voices of kindergarten teachers. Through this dual framework, we demonstrate how institutional practices and professional narratives, while framed as inclusive, often reproduce hierarchical relations and cultural otherings. Our findings suggest that the rhetoric of inclusion, rather than dismantling social inequalities, contributes to the re-ethnicization of Roma children and their families. In this way, the study highlights the ambivalent role of early childhood education as both a site of care and a mechanism for the subtle reproduction of social and ethnic boundaries.