Browsing by Subject "kaksikulttuurisuus"

Goals. The topic of the research was chosen among important topics to me: the development of a child’s bicultural identity and multiculturalism in early childhood education (later referred to as ECE) in the context of Finnish-African families. Similar research has not been conducted in ECE before. This is a timely topic since diversity through multiculturalism is part of everyday life in the ECE these days, no matter what the child’s family background is. The goal of the research was to find out how ECE supports the development of bicultural identity of the children according to Finnish-African parents’ experience. In addition, I will identify the kind of support the parents would wish for and how they would like to see multicultural education as part of ECE. Furthermore, the research discusses quality of educational co-operation and biases families have experienced towards their multicultural background in the day care. Methods. I created an online questionnaire on a kyselynett.com-website. 48 parents from Finn-ish-African Children’s Facebook group participated in the research. Finally 21 out of the 48 par-ticipants were selected for the final research because they completed the whole questionnaire. The questionnaire consisted of 14 open-ended and two multiple-choice questions. Content anal-ysis methods were used for analyzing the results of the questionnaire. I worked around the an-swers grouping them into themes and dividing the answers according to their similarities and dif-ferences for each research question. Results and conclusions. The results showed that parents were very satisfied with the quality of ECE. Parents felt that their children are equally treated in the day care. Roughly half of the participants claimed that the child’s other culture had been taken into consideration in the ECE. However, 16 parents felt that the educational staff does not provide support in developing the child’s bicultural identity. According to more than half of the participants the day care centres did not arrange activities that would pay attention to multiculturalism. Parents were hoping that the staff would pay more attention to the African parent of the family in the educational co-operation. All in all the participants’ answers and wishes were largely alike. The development of a child’s bicultural identity and multiculturalism in ECE should have a more visible role. The co-operation with parents should be more equal. The day care centres should have more activities that pay attention to multiculturalism. Ideas for further research could be researching bicultural children.