The early childhood education and care partnership for bilingualism in minority language schooling: collaboration between bilingual families and pedagogical practitioners

ABSTRACT

Educational partnerships occur at the intersection of early childhood education and care (ECEC), families, and the surrounding community, and have been shown to play a significant role in student success rates in education. There is, however, a gap in research on the role and potential of ‘partnership’ in the case of bilingual families with children enrolled in monolingual minority language ECEC. This study aimed to fill this void by examining parental and practitioner discourses on partnership and on obligations, desires, abilities, and competencies involved in acting on a bilingual childhood in the context of monolingual minority ECEC. Parents in nine Finnish–Swedish bilingual families and six pedagogical practitioners at three Swedish-medium minority language ECEC units in Finland were interviewed. We applied ethnographic discourse analysis – nexus analysis – on the interview data and found that the family languages (Finnish and Swedish) did not seem to be given equal importance; Swedish, the minority language in Finland and the language of the ECEC, was foregrounded at the expense of Finnish. The study suggests that partnership is a useful concept and a tool to understand the possibilities and challenges involved in promoting bilingualism in ECEC, especially in the context of a minority language ECEC.

KEYWORDS:

• Childhood bilingualism
• early childhood education and care
• educational partnership
• bilingual family
• educational practitioners
• language policy

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes on contributors

Mari Bergroth is Postdoctoral Reseacher at the Department of Languages, University of Jyväskylä, Finland.

Åsa Palviainen is full Professor of Swedish at the Department of Languages, University of Jyväskylä, Finland.

Notes

1. In Finnish-medium schools, most pupils study English as their first foreign language and start to study Swedish by the age of 12 years (in grade 6). Although native-level Swedish is an alternative for bilingual students in Finnish-medium schools, it is rarely offered in practice and much less so than native-level Finnish in Swedish-medium schools.

2. According to Act on the Status and Rights of Social Welfare Clients (Ministry of Social Affairs and Health 2001), the family and the ECEC jointly draw up a plan agreeing on how the care will be carried out. In all decisions made, the family’s interests come first. Both family and the ECEC unit should be committed to the plan.

Additional information

Funding

The research described in this paper was supported by a grant from the Academy of Finland, Research Council for Culture and Society [grant number 266850].