‘I can’t sit here and cry with you, I have to play’. Strategies by very young children in refugee collective accommodation

ABSTRACT

Little is known about the everyday life of very young children in refugee collective accommodation centres, hosted together with their parents. Access to high-quality provision of early education and care is not implemented. Against this background, the paper explores young children’s everyday life practices in these specific centres. This paper presents findings from an explorative ethnographic research project in refugee accommodation centres in Germany. Researchers accompanied 12 children aged three to seven years old in their daily play and family activities through participant observation in different refugee centres. Against the constraints of their life circumstances, refugee children’s activities are discussed as children’s unique ways of appropriation, demonstrating social actor-ship. In outlook, the paper highlights co-operative work with refugee parents and the use of ethnographic research findings to inform programmes in Early Childhood Education and Care.

KEYWORDS:

• Refugees
• young children
• collective accommodation
• education and care
• ethnography

Acknowledgements

I would like to acknowledge the support by the editors of this special issue, Chiara Maria Bove and Nima Sharmahd. I am grateful for the important comments by the peer reviewers of prior versions of this paper. To Penelope Scott, Thi Huyen Trang Le, Sonja Stegmeier, Sarah Fichtner and Hoa Mai Trần, research project collaborators, I am much obliged to dispose of their transcripts and their consent for publication. Finally, my gratitude does to the refugee children, parents and staff in the RCA for their commitment with the research project.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1 This article is informed by original fieldwork conducted by Penelope Scott, Thi Huyen Trang Le, Sonja Stegmeier, Sarah Fichtner and Hoa Mai Trần, all collaborators in the research project.

2 The pseudonym is the boy’s pick. The project payed attention to child participation.