Towards a renewed understanding of barriers to immigrant parents’ involvement in education

Abstract

This article investigates Danish and Norwegian early childhood education and care teachers’ expectations of immigrant parents’ involvement in kindergarten. The findings are interpreted in terms of the multifaceted interplay between social class relations, culture, migration and hegemonic ideals of intensive parenting and concerted cultivation. By taking the early childhood education and care teachers’ standpoint, the article contributes a renewed understanding of previous reports of barriers to immigrant parents’ involvement in their children's education. Based on early childhood education and care teachers’ accounts, I identify three key tensions: (1) conflicting perceptions of responsibility, (2) conflicting perceptions of children's roles and how to communicate with children and (3) conflicting perceptions of what kindergarten is and what constitutes valuable knowledge. The findings suggest the existence of a distinct Nordic adaptation to intensive parenting, contradicting parts of the dominant understandings of concerted cultivation found in more school-oriented curricular contexts, such as the UK and France, while still maintaining the original key characteristics of concerted cultivation.