Browsing by Author "Taivainen, Anni"

Tiivistelmä - Referat - Abstract The concept of multiculturalism is often used in the world of education. In connection with this concept, we also often talk about immigrants. However, every child, group of children, or work community, for example, can be thought of as multicultural. For this reason, when using the term multiculturalism, one should be particularly sensitive and define what kind of phenomenon the concept describes. Each pre-school group has children from different cultural and linguistic backgrounds, and children are influenced by a wide range of cultures outside the pre-school. Pre-primary education should therefore be culturally and linguistically aware, it should take into account the linguistic and cultural background of each child and family, so that each child receives support in building and developing their cultural identity. Diversity should therefore be a prerequisite for learning, allowing each child to build and grow his or her own cultural identity on an equal footing, and through which children can also perceive and experience different cultures and languages in a safe environment. The purpose of this master's thesis was to find out what kind of things children bring up from their own cultural background and what kind of things they notice in their peers. The dissertation focuses especially on the interaction between children in the daily life of pre-school education in a group where 16 children spoke a language other than Finnish as their native language. The dissertation was carried out as an ethnographic observational study. Participatory observation as well as covert observation have been used as observation means, various interaction situations between children have also been videotaped. The material has been analyzed in the way of a discussion analysis, and the observations have been divided into four different categories according to the principles of thematic design. The material consists of observations collected during the spring of 2021 in a pre-school group in Helsinki. With the written permission of the guardians, 19 pre-school children participated in the study. Based on the observational data, it can be concluded that the children of the preschool group were interested in each other’s cultural backgrounds and were proud of their own backgrounds, especially their knowledge of different languages. The children asked each other about their mother tongue, were interested in learning them and, for example, wanted to teach each other their own mother tongue. Children discussed ways of different countries as well as different religions, especially in eating situations, comparing, for example, what kind of food was offered in pre-school education and what was eaten at home or wondering why some children ate pork and some did not. Religions also appear in the observational material in discussions about gods of different religions or searching for children from the same religion in a group. The importance of a sense of belonging is emphasized in the material strongly. The children care about belonging to their own group, but also take care of the other children in the group. This can be seen, for example, in noticing a lack of common language skills, for example during play time. From the observational data, it can be concluded that the feeling of belonging to a group is important for children and children may distort their language skills or say that they belong to a religious group to which they did not really belong in order to feel part of the group.