NJCIE 2018, Vol. 2(1), 39-54
http://doi.org/10.7577/njcie.2238
Kindergarten Practice: The Situated Socialization of Minority Parents
Janne Solberg[1]
Associate
Professor, University of South-Eastern Norway
Peer-reviewed article; received 30 October 2017;
accepted 23 April 2018
Abstract
Almost all parents in Norway
use kindergarten and part of becoming a kindergarten
parent is learning the routines of the particular institution. Thus, kindergarten
parents go through a socialization process, learning amongst other how to
deliver and pick up their children. Building on ten days observations of
bringing and delivery scenes in a kindergarten, it is here suggested that this
socialization process may have a racialized character. The kindergarten in
question had special delivery routines, which the kindergarten staff expected
parents to carry out, but not everybody did, and the article investigates how
the staff reacted towards the three deviant cases observed. The bottom-up
analysis of the social interaction between the parents and the staff is here supplied
by the perspective of racialization, questioning the gaze of majority persons
and their naturalized power to define non-complying parents as something other. The kindergarten staff did not
overtly orient to the non-compliance as a problem in the case where the parent
had a majority background, which was in much contrast to their conduct in the
two other cases with minority parents. In these cases, the staff interacted
in a unilateral manner by giving advice and even instructions, very much
embodying what Palludan in her study of children-staff interaction calls the teaching tone.
Keywords: kindergarten parents;
minority parents; parent socialization; institutional discrimination; othering
Introduction
In Norway, all children from about the age of one year, are entitled to
a place in kindergarten providing children
with good opportunities for development
and activity. In 2016, 91% of children between one to five years old attended kindergarten,
for children speaking a minority language the number was 76%[2]
(SSB, 2017). The kindergarten service is mainly
financed by public grants, being disposed of
by the municipal. There is a user fee as well, but the size of the fee is
regulated and there are arrangements ensuring reduced payment for low-income
families. This means that attending kindergarten
is a very ordinary thing to do in everyday family life, and in the kindergarten, they meet staff with different
backgrounds in terms of education. About 40% have a pedagogical education (mostly as preschool teachers), about 30% are
skilled workers (often children and youth workers) and the rest are registered
with “different backgrounds” (Utdanningsdirektoratet,
2018).
According to The Kindergarten Act §1, the
relationship between kindergarten staff and parents should be characterized by
cooperation and mutual understanding. While these terms suggest an equal partnership between parents and staff, the kindergarten
is also an institution with “predefined patterns of conduct” (Berger & Luckmann, 1967, p. 72) which parents are expected to adapt to. Thus, in everyday
encounters, parents and kindergarten staff meet as insiders and outsiders, rather than on neutral ground as equal partners
as policy documents seem to assume. Building on observations of delivery/picking-up
episodes for a period of ten days, the analytic focus in this article is on how
the staff in this kindergarten socialize parents to the local routines for
delivering children. The so-called
kitchen-routine will be described in more detail below, but in short, parents
were expected to deliver their children in a common area called the kitchen, rather than in the wardrobe
area. The special
arrangement had been explained to the parents in a parent meeting, I was told,
but not all parents attended the meeting, and as one of the preschool teachers said: “This routine is perhaps not so easy to
understand for all [parents]”.
The present article
investigates the local norms for delivering children, with a special focus on
how the kindergarten staff managed deviances from the expected routine. Though
it is more usual to adopt the term socialization in the child-adult
relationship, it will here be argued that this is an inherent dimension of the
parent-staff relationship as well. This is not to suggest a unilateral
understanding of socialization as this article is grounded in the micro-perspective of
ethnomethodology. Within this perspective, conversation or talk is “the central
medium for human socialization” (Goodwin &
Heritage, 1990, p. 289) and the capacity to socialize
others relates to the performance of all participants
or members of a group—not primarily those conventionally
acknowledged as socialization agents or professionals. As expressed in the
research of language socialization: “(…) it is not only the child who is being socialized—the child, through its actions and verbalizations, is also actively (if
not necessarily consciously) socializing the mother as a mother” (Kulick &
Schieffelin, 2008, p. 350). Accordingly, socialization is not
a one-way street and in the analysis section, there will be an instance
demonstrating that also parents at times may attempt to change the conduct of
the staff.
The staff’s socialization-in-action described in
this article takes place in a nursery department
where over half of the parents had a minority
background. In this article, I will often refer to persons with majority
or minority background. The content of these terms are debated, but it is common
to understand a minority group to be non-dominant and numerically inferior to the
rest of the population of a state (Døving, 2011).
The
socialization practices observed will be discussed in terms of being
discriminatory towards minority parents, and if so, at what analytic level does
the discrimination seem to be (systemic vs. individual discrimination). In
terms of analysis, this means looking at the practices from both an emic
(from inside) and an etic (from
outside) viewpoint (Pike, 1967). Following an ethnomethodological emic approach, it is perhaps hard
to argue that it was a member’s project to discriminate or racialize. Instead, racialization is nowadays more often
thought of as taken for granted understandings and language practices
unconsciously shared by the majority group. Within the post-colonial tradition,
building on Edward W. Said’s book Orientalism
(1974), members of the West, or the majority, have the power to define what is
not normal or different about them (See Rogstad
& Midtbøen, 2009). But while it is acknowledged that everyday
language is an efficient tool for minorizing
or othering minority groups, there is little empirical research
documenting the connection between discriminating structures and individual
actions (Rogstad &
Midtbøen, 2010). This article will contribute in
this respect, and, as the analysis will show the everyday categorization
between us and them may in practice be very subtly performed, invoking
categorizations and descriptions indexing the heart of the institutional logic,
rather than ethnicity per se.
Previous research
The socialization
of kindergarten parents is at least
implicitly touched on in research on the Nordic kindergarten tradition.
Findings from the Norwegian survey study “The multicultural kindergarten in
rural areas” suggest that the staff do expect parents to adapt to institutional
routines. As much as 70% of the staff agreed on
the importance of parents adapting to the rules of the
kindergarten as quickly as possible (Andersen et al., 2011). But adapting to the rules of the kindergarten can be a tall order
to some parents, especially in the start-up period, and even more, if the parents have a minority background
(Andenæs, 2011; Bundgaard & Gulløv, 2008). In the interview study of Andenæs (2011) an immigrant mother explains that
she finds delivering and picking up at day care
difficult:
Being an immigrant implies that one is constantly evaluated by others she says, to see whether one is good enough or not. She feels a need to protect herself from the kind of interpretations she encounters, so often in the style of `it`s because you are from X country that you behave like this (Andenæs, 2011, p. 61)
The ethnography study of Bundgaard and Gulløv (2008) describes a difficult situation
from the start-up period where a minority mother stayed in the wardrobe area
and refused to enter the nursery department, with much difficulty for the
start-up. The most interesting about this instance is how passive the kindergarten
staff act.
Possibly, the staff’s passivity described in
Bundgaard and Gulløv (2008) should be understood as
business-as-usual, rather than representing something very unusual in the kindergarten
institution. In a recent Norwegian master thesis observing the interaction
between staff, parents and children, Haug (2016) argues,
by adopting Latour’s concept of internalized
borders, that there is an invisible line between the department (as the
staff’s area) and the wardrobe area. Merely in two of forty-two observed
situations in the morning, the parent would cross the border and follow the
child into the department. Although the caretakers in Haug’s study did say that they wanted the parents to
enter the department more often, little was actually done to promote this. The
thesis also gives examples of how parents who do cross the line are not spoken
to (Haug, 2016, p.
33). Hence, if the staff does not relate to parents who are crossing the
border as doing the right thing it is
perhaps not only minority parents who will experience the wardrobe area as a
more neutral space (Bundgaard &
Gulløv, 2008, p. 60). Much likely, parents who are
unfamiliar with the Nordic kindergarten
tradition may be even more likely to feel out
of place when crossing the border.
Moreover, research also gives reason to investigate whether
parents with minority background are met in a different way compared to
majority parents. Palludan’s ethnographic study (Palludan, 2005), building on
Bourdieu’s theoretical framework (Bourdieu, 1977), describes how the staff meets children from different social and ethnic
groups with what she calls different language
tones (Palludan, 2005,
2007). She describes a communication
pattern where children with majority background are met with a democratic exchange tone while children with
minority background are met with a teaching
tone, unilaterally instructing and showing the child how to perform. This
means that not all children are in a position
to establish an equal partnership with the kindergarten staff. According to
Palludan (2005, p. 138), this segregated recognition
practice is also at work when the staff interact
with the parents, but evidence demonstrating how this comes about in practice
is not presented. However, as we will learn from the data presented in this
paper, this may not be an unreasonable claim.
Context of the study: The routine
Due to economic reasons, only one of the four departments would be
staffed before 8.30 a.m., in the three other departments,
the children should be delivered in the
kitchen. This meant that children quite often would be greeted by care
providers who they did not know very well. Delivering a child in the kitchen may be seen as fulfilling what
could be called a trajectory of care, which might be more or less elaborated.
Before entering the kitchen, the parents need to help their child with undressing and
then look over the child’s shelf in the wardrobe. When the parents approach the kitchen, they encounter an open area with
many tables, the number of persons in the room (adults and children sitting at
the tables) may vary from day to day. No
doubt, this is a very different material structure compared to the more usual
pattern described in Haug (2016, p. 24) where the care provider meets the child and the parent in the wardrobe
area. The material structure of the kitchen sets premises for the conduct of
both parties, thus the structure so to speak becomes a “co-creator in and of
everyday life” (Dannesboe, 2017, s 215). While the notion kitchen assumes familiar users, there was a divide between the
children who would have breakfast in the
kitchen and those who would not.
When the child was having breakfast, the
parents had a clear mission in the room: To place the child at one of the
tables, open the lunch-box, pour up milk and say goodbye to the child. In
practice, this could be rather time
extensive, especially in the case of toddlers. One mother used to take off both
her jacket and her shoes before following her child into the kitchen. Both kindergarten
staff and parents expected children of all ages to choose a table and then a
chair on their own by asking them “Where do you want to sit?” Usually there was
not very much talk between the parents and the staff as the latter tend to
concentrate upon giving the child a good reception, however, greetings as “good morning” and “goodbye”, with or without
eye contact, were common. There could be exceptions to this child-centered focus, for instance, if the child had been, or could
possibly be, ill. This represents an out-of-order
state where parents and staff talk together within an adult frame. Although in
an ethnomethodological perspective all actions are accomplishments, parents who accompany a child eating breakfast did
not seem to have much trouble with making themselves accountable in this
setting. Their actions so to speak fulfills
the purpose of the room, the furniture (table, chairs) and the equipment onto
the table (glasses, water jug, a carton
of milk and so forth).
In contrast, the parents whose children had
eaten breakfast at home were obviously in a more ambiguous social situation.
These children should also be brought into the kitchen, but then they should be
channeled into the one department which
had the early guard (this would ambulate according to an internal schedule, not
communicated to the parents). Parents of children who had eaten breakfast at
home would often stop at the doorstep or take just a few steps into the kitchen
to make themselves visible to the staff. Usually,
there was not much interaction with the staff, apart from greetings and/or eye
contact. From my position, I could
observe that eye contact was not always very easy to establish, for instance,
when the staff was sitting with the back
to the doorway. The staff were often busy
talking with the children and did not seem to monitor the doorways. When eye
contact (eventually) was established the staff would usually not rise from the
chair and approach the parent in the doorway. Messages were seldom given to the
staff, but at one occasion a father informed, standing in the doorway, that the
child “had been to the toilet this morning” (I guess this had been an issue to
the child in question). Providing such private information about a child with
the whole room as overhearers appeared to be somewhat odd. But this parent so
to speak ignored the poor terms of talking, given this particular material
structure, and provided the information he thought was important.
A very important stage of delivering
in the kitchen was saying goodbye to the child. This is part of the intimacy practice (Haug, 2016, p. 29)
between parent and child and implies physical contact (hugs, kisses, bowing and
so forth) in addition to verbal interaction (Bye honey, have a nice day). As
families nowadays are defined by the quality of the relationship, rather than a
given membership (Finch, 2007, p 71), the goodbye exchange was obviously not
simply an empty ritual, but a moment of much importance to the parents. This
became explicit in scenes where the child for
some other reason did not cooperate and turned away from the parent. In one
example a mother explained her child’s dismissive behavior with that the child might not feel all well this morning,
thus she obviously interpreted this as deviant conduct, calling for an account
to the audience. In another instance, an older child would not return to the mother
in the doorway to kiss her goodbye, and the mother sighed heavily on her way
out, with a sorrow expression on her face (this happened several times during
the observation period). Thus, dropping-off in the kitchen involved a composed
trajectory of care where good family relations were displayed to a wide
audience (the staff, other parents/children).
Methods
The aim of the fieldwork was to gain empirical knowledge about the
informal parent cooperation in everyday encounters, with a special focus on the
staff’s interaction with parents who had a minority background. The study was
funded by Oslofjordfondet and The University College of Southeast Norway. The observations
were made over a fortnight period and summed up to about sixteen observation
sessions, lasting at least two hours each. The parents received information
about the study in a parent meeting before start-up and written information
about the study was provided as well. Parents could opt out of being observed,
but no one did. In the morning, I did my observations sitting on a chair in the
kitchen or from the bench in the wardrobe area in one of the departments. The
children and the parents entered the kitchen from four doors, and sitting on a
chair in the middle of the room, I was able to monitor the doorways, in both
directions. The next page shows a simple sketch of the room.
Figure 1: The
kitchen
The parents would enter the room from the wardrobe area through the four
doorways, while the staff would sit around at the tables and talk with the
children or they would go to and from the tables and the kitchen section. As I
will come back to in the analysis section, sitting in the middle of the room
gave me a wider perspective than the staff who could sit with their back to
some of the doors. In terms of research roles,
I was certainly more an outsider than an insider. Being interested in the
interaction between the staff and the parents I was not interested in going
native as a staff member, but at times it was difficult to be an observer only.
Mainly because of the children who often talked to me or approached me, to sit on my lap or to give me a hug.
Sitting in these areas, without nothing else to do, I also established a polite
relation to the parents, mostly through smiles and greetings. Often I was the
only adult person available, as the staff were elsewhere or occupied with the
kids, thus to me, it felt like an
appropriate thing to do.
Building on an ethnomethodological perspective,
the expression unmotivated looking (Psathas, 1995,
p. 45), suggests the researcher to start
observing without theoretical assumptions and thus be interested in whatever is
going on in self-organizing settings. Although I sympathize with the empiricist image of ethnomethodology, my lens
would, of course, be affected by my prior knowledge about kindergarten practices, and, not least, earlier
research. As mentioned, Palludan’s distinction between teaching tone and
exchange tone in interaction between kindergarten staff and children (Palludan, 2005), had made me wonder whether we
could see this pattern in interaction with parents as well, and in this sense
my observations may not have been all unmotivated. Though this was not
formulated as a hypothesis for the study, I was interested in learning whether
the parent’s ethnicity (as a majority/minority member) would somehow affect the
staff-parent interaction.
In ethnomethodological research, the participants’ reaction to deviant conduct is one
important resource for explicating the rules of a setting. As put by Wooofitt:
“...if someone displays that they are ‘noticing’ the absence of a certain type
of turn from a co-participant, then that demonstrates their own orientation to
the normative expectation that it should have been produced”(Wooffitt, 2005,
p. 61). This was the insight of
Garfinkel’s famous breaching experiments
where Garfinkel told his students to produce out-of-place responses in their
daily interaction (Garfinkel,
1967). The hostile reactions of the
victims displayed the normative expectation that they should have been
understood as having produced an accountable
action. The deviant conduct made the normative pattern of business-as-usual
visible. In this study, I observed that
most parents followed their child into the kitchen. Though, because a few
parents did not, it took a couple of days to firmly establish my understanding.
The routine had not been explained to me in detail, thus in the onset, I was not sure how things worked, and
because of this, I think I was able to relate the insecurity of some of the
parents in terms of what to do. My reflexivity, and possibly the parents’
reflexivity, would center around issues
such as: How far should one go into the room? Should
you talk to the staff? What do you do
when the staff does not respond or is out of the room? After having noticed a
couple of deviances to the usual pattern, I tested out my own assumptions by
asking one of the staff whether parents were supposed to follow their children
into the kitchen, and this was confirmed.
Getting the (minority)
parents into the kitchen
While most of the parents carried out the routine and accompanied their
child into the kitchen or at least to the doorstep of the kitchen, there were,
as mentioned, interesting deviances to this delivery pattern. In three cases, I
observed the parents leaving their children in the wardrobe area without
establishing contact with the staff before leaving. In the following, I will
describe how the kindergarten staff followed up each of these cases.
Case 1
The first case was a child about four
years old, in contrast to Case 2 and Case 3 this child was not a
newcomer. Her father, who had a majority background, always left the
kindergarten in a hurry. If no one from the staff was around in the wardrobe
area while he was there, he would say goodbye to the child and leave. I did not
see anybody of the staff noticing or acting on this conduct as problematic.
Case 2
In contrast to Case 1, a mother with minority background was followed up
for not bringing her child into the kitchen. I observed her as she helped her
child with getting undressed. The care provider on duty came out in the
wardrobe area and declared in a loud and clear voice (in Norwegian) “We are in the
kitchen now”, then the topic shifted to talk about today’s events. This
underlining of locality is a very indirect way of affecting the mother’s behavior, leaving it to the mother herself to
figure out that she should accompany her child into the kitchen. But the mother
was not given the chance to demonstrate her understanding of this hidden
message. The next day, another member of the staff was on duty, and she came
out in the wardrobe area and told the mother: “Very nice if you can follow him
into the kitchen”. The mother nodded and confirmed verbally in a low voice.
Compared to the day before this strategy is a more direct way of unilaterally
advising the mother which is in line with what Palludan (2005) calls the teaching tone.
Case 3
The teaching tone was even more clearly present in the third instance
where the kindergarten teacher spoke
English with a father (English is not their mother tongue, but both of them
spoke English quite well I was told). When the father came to pick up his
toddler, the teacher instantly sat down next to him on the bench in the
wardrobe area and she told him in English: “In the morning, it’s important that
you go- Sometimes there are not any
grown-ups here, so you have to bring him into ‘kjøkkenet’ [the kitchen]”. The
father said “OK”, and the kindergarten teacher said “very good”. She then
laughed briefly, stood up and left. Note that the care provider first designed
her turn as an unmitigated instruction: “In the morning, it’s important that
you go-“, but then she cut herself off and provided an account at least indexing
a thinking around children safety (“Sometimes there are not any grown-ups
here”). This accounting element displays an understanding of performing a
delicate action, and contribute to softening
the instruction which follows “so you have to bring him into ‘kjøkkenet’ [the
kitchen]”. On the other hand, the choice of the verb you have to indicates a very strong right on her own behalf to
decide how the arrangement should be.
Albeit Case 2 and Case 3 represent clear
instances of what Palludan calls the teaching tone, several weeks had gone
since the start-up of the semester. Why
did these direct ways of socializing the parents occur this late? Had the staff
waited for the parents to adapt to the routines on their own before
intervening? Another explanation for this delayed intervention might be that my presence made them become more
reflective and thus conscious of the deviances. As mentioned, after noticing
that not all children were followed into the kitchen, I asked one of the staff
whether this was desired or not. Hence, my presence might have induced the
staff to monitor the rules more than usual; this is also known as the
observer’s paradox. But what is most surprising about these instances is
perhaps not the advice-giving itself, but that the teaching tone in little
degrees is balanced with small-talk or other affiliating actions embodying an
exchange tone. Although this study has not examined how the parents felt about
being objected to these socializing actions, the encounters in Case 2 and 3 had
in my opinion what Goffman would call a face-threatening quality (Goffman, 1967). The staff in question seemed to
lack the professional informality
needed to constitute an affiliating atmosphere when guiding the parents. It
should be noted that other instances of giving instructions were observed in
this kindergarten, which were given in a warmer and more recognizing
style, thus, the point here is not to establish all socializing actions as bad on their own but to focus on how they
are produced in social interaction.
Passing problems
Few think of institutions as determining human conduct, in Gulløv’s
wording “Institutions are simultaneously committing and dynamic frames around
formalized communities” (Gulløv, 2017,
p. 41). However, in both of the cases
mentioned above, the staff’s socializing actions seemed to be successful; the next
day both of the parents followed their child into the kitchen or at least to
the doorstep. Even the parent’s realization of the routine very much depends on the cooperation of the professional
part, who is the one entitled to acknowledge that the child is being delivered
in an appropriate manner. In this respect, the mother in Case 2 had certain passing problems, and a
comment from the care provider on this particular event is very interesting as
it conveys a reasoning around what might be the staff’s collective project of
socializing minority parents to follow the routine.
One morning, the mother from Case 2 came a few steps into the kitchen saying hello,
I would say with a normal loud voice, and from my chair at the side of the room I returned her greeting. There was
one care provider in the room who was sitting at the table with her back at the
doorway. She was talking with a child and did not recognize that two children
(both with minority background) were delivered behind her back. One of the
mothers went into the office of the nursery manager, while the mother who said
hello without being heard, waited a moment before leaving. Soon the care
provider at the table discovered that one of the children had arrived. She took
up her iPad and I told her that the other child also had been delivered. The
care provider then asked me: “They did not come in?” (they may here be referring to both cases). I told her that the
mother in question did, but that she was not noticed. The care provider then
said: “Oh yes, I sat the other way”. The oh,
yes preface suggests this to be a here-and-now discovery to her (Heritage, 1984). After a pause an account followed: “We try to teach them to come in and
communicate with us in the kitchen. This is also about attitudes to kindergarten. Some think of it more as storage”.
The noun we
in the utterance “we try to teach them to come in and communicate with us” suggests
that teaching parents to come in and talk with the staff is not her personal
opinion, but a collective project, she is talking on behalf of a professional we (See Drew &
Sorjonen, 1997 p. 97 about use of personal pronoun). Strictly speaking, the utterance
says nothing about the ethnicity or the socio-cultural background of the them, so why do I hear the term them in this utterance to be parents
with minority background? Is it because I use my common sense knowledge? Now
while background knowledge certainly matters, this is not sufficient to explain
my inference. Following an ethnomethodologically way of thinking, indexicality
is the rule in human interaction, not the exception, and sequence is the most important sense-making
vehicle. In this instance, the care provider produces her utterance (we try to
teach them) without a lengthy pause to her prior utterance (oh yes, I sat the
other way). Neither the turn is linguistically designed as launching a new
topic, it is easily heard as an extension of the existing project of figuring
out what just happened. Thus, it is my reflexive knowledge about how
conversational actions tend to be packed, rather than factual background
knowledge alone, which explains why I hear it this way. Still, the care
provider’s choice of noun after I have explained that the particular mother was
not noticed is interesting indeed. By saying them rather than she, a
first name, the mother of X and so forth, she refers to a group of people, not
to a singular person. Moreover, the group in question is alluded to as people
(some) who think day kindergarten is
about storing, and this undermining description constructs them as a negative contrast group to people knowing better, which
obviously includes the staff, the more competent we.
Regardless of ethnic origin, parents are often
not talked to in delivery scenes, hence, this utterance may imply a thinking
suggesting that talking to the staff is particularly important for minority
parents. Moreover, the account “we try to teach them to come in and communicate
with us in the kitchen” is ambiguous as it is not apparent whether this in
Scott and Lyman’s (1968) sense represents an excuse (denying
her own responsibility for the incident), or a justification (denying the
pejorative qualities of her actions). Taken as an excuse, minority parents have
been taught to come in and talk to the staff in the kitchen, thus unstated; if the
mother had followed this advice, she would not have gone unnoticed by the care
provider and the incident becomes the mother’s own fault. In this version, the
account is easy to hear as a complaint over the mother’s non-complying conduct.
However, the same utterance can also be understood as a justification (Scott &
Lyman, 1968). The incident of not noticing the
mother is then not a bad thing, but something inducing parents to enter the
kitchen and get in touch with the staff. Hence, to achieve this, a certain management of inaccessibility can even
be used to integrate parents into the kindergarten
culture. However, as the oh, yes
preface suggests, the presence of the mother to be a here-and-now discovery to
her (Heritage, 1984), it is perhaps more appropriate to
interpret this as complaint after all (the turn was designed for me, but I
chose to treat it as an explanation of what we do, rather than as a complaint,
thus in my interpretation, it was
sufficient for me to nod rather than sympathise).
Getting the staff into the
wardrobe area
In this section, I will try
to balance the impression of parents being socialized in a unilateral fashion. Albeit mostly adapting to
the staff’s actions, parents are also actors who sometimes try to negotiate the
institutional terms. In an interview with a majority mother, a personal strategy for getting the staff’s attention in
the morning was revealed. She told that she often puts her head into the
department and says hello to the staff, and very often someone from the staff
will come out in the wardrobe area and meet them. I asked whether she thinks
all parents would be met in this way, but she thought it would be different for
parents who are not as much on as she
is, for instance very cautious parents or ethnic minority parents. During the
observation period, I observed a scene
which could remind of this strategy of claiming attention.
A minority father with a quite small child used
to come into the kitchen, carrying the child on his arm while an older sibling
would wait in or nearby the doorway. The father would proceed to a table with
grown-ups and other children and he would put the child into one of the baby chairs.
Then one of the staff would stand up and say that the child does not need to
sit there if she had eaten at home. One day something interesting happened at
an unusually quiet early watch. The older sibling showed himself in the doorway
and waves to one of the staff, standing at the kitchen bench, to make her come
out in the wardrobe area. The care provider was doing some paper work and she said in a quite low voice
and without looking up at him that “X [the name of the child] can come into the
kitchen”. She thus rejected the sibling’s request to come out in the wardrobe
area. The boy disappeared for a moment, and when he came back he had a
desperate expression on his face. Though hard to say for sure, it is much
likely that the older sibling was mediating his father’s preferences, rather
than his own. Soon after, the child and the father entered the room, this time
the child walked on her own feet. The father stopped
in the doorway and gently pushed the child toward another staff member who approached
them.
At this moment, there were just a few children in the kitchen and one of the staff could
easily have disappeared out for a moment, thus the rules of the institution are
possibly not very easy to get around. This is not to suggest that parents
cannot be “institutional entrepreneurs” (see Gulløv,
2017, p. 51 ) and change institutional routines
and arrangements, but probably this is perhaps more likely to happen at the
system level when parents act like a
group.
The scene also indicates
that the practice of delivery in the kitchen is extra problematic when it comes
to toddlers. In her master thesis, Haug (2016, p. 29) describes the exchanges between
parent and child as an “intimacy practice” where the staff in comparison is
more of a bystander. But Haug’s fieldwork was conducted in a department with
older children. When it comes to toddlers, it is perhaps more appropriate to
say that the care provider is an active participant and co-operator in the
intimacy practice. When toddlers are handed over in the wardrobe area, the care
provider needs to physically position her body close to the child and the
parent, and the child goes from the arms of the parent into the arms of the
care provider. Very often the care provider will hold the child when she is
kissed goodbye by the parent. the kitchen arrangement makes this bodily
cooperation difficult. The staff usually sit at the table and entertain the
children, and they did not stand up when a parent showed up. As long as the
care provider sits at the table it is natural to see her as busy or inaccessible, thus, this places the
parent in an interactional ambiguous situation in terms of what to do. In the example, this ambivalence is managed by placing
the child in a chair at the table. Thus, his actions can be understood in light
of the interactional context embedded in this particular material structure,
rather than the father’s lack of background knowledge (not knowing the
arrangement or the Norwegian kindergarten
culture).
Discussion
The kitchen-routine appeared to be a somewhat demanding arrangement for
the parents to take part in, especially when it comes to delivering toddlers. Most
likely, the structure is particularly demanding for minority parents, to whom delivering in the kitchen is also a public
display of ethnicity and language skills as well as good family relations.
Possibly, the arrangement may be seen as a case of institutional discrimination
(Kamali, 2005), where, albeit not intended by
anyone, routines and arrangements do not function equally well for all groups.
In this case, it is hard to see that the
arrangement functions very well for any group as financial concerns lie behind,
but it probably works even worse for parents and children with a minority
background. Information about the arrangement had been given at a parent
meeting, which not all attended, and, since the meeting was given in Norwegian,
understanding might have been an issue to some parents. Moreover, information
about the staffing schedule had not been distributed to the parents, thus the
burden to figure out the arrangement of the day was very much up to the
parents.
The analysis focused on what happened in the three deviant cases where the parents did
not follow the children into the kitchen as expected. Would the staff socialize
these parents to follow the routine, and how was this performed? In Case 1
where the parent had a majority background, the staff did not do anything
during the observation period to change conduct, in contrast to the two other
cases, where the parents had a minority background. The micro analysis of the staff’s socialization-in-action confirms
Palludan’s impression that also parents with a minority background are met by a
teaching tone, rather than an including exchange tone (Palludan, 2005,
p. 138). In Case 2 the mother was
indirectly (“We are in the kitchen now”), and directly (“Very nice if you
can…”) advised accompanying her child
into the kitchen. In Case 3 it is perhaps more appropriate to say that the
father was being instructed on what to do (“you have to bring him”). However,
it should be added that several weeks had passed without the staff’s
intervention, thus passivity (Bundgaard &
Gulløv, 2008) is perhaps the most appropriate
characterization of their overall orientation. If so, the teaching tone may be
better understood as a last resort. All in all, the staff seemed to be in short
of the professional informality needed to balance the sociological and everyday
meanings of the term socialization (where the latter means to be sociable).
However, it should be noted that regardless of the parents’ sociocultural
background, the exchange tone seemed to be quite rare in the parent-staff
interaction as the staff tended to focus on giving the child a good reception.
The socialization was successful as the parents in Case 2 and 3 changed conduct
and started to come into the kitchen or in the doorway. On the other hand, the
staff was not prone to make an exception
from the routine and come out in the wardrobe area to meet the parents.
Actions designed at socializing (minority)
parents may be performed in a more or less tactful manner, but can we, in this
case, assume bad intentions on behalf of
the staff? Following Bourdieu, Palludan (2005, 2007) understands the teaching tone as a
structural phenomenon. Partly, the issue is understood as the minority
children’s’ communicative competence (their habituated cultural capital), which
makes the teaching tone natural to adopt for the staff to be able to
communicate at all. But she also notices that the teaching tone is at work even
when minority children speak Danish fluently. This is explained as an effect of
the staff’s unconscious categorization of minority
children as less capable. This way of reasoning is in line with newer
perspectives on discrimination as systemic, in terms of unconscious actions or
unfortunate consequences of rules (Rogstad &
Midtbøen, 2010, p. 45). In contrast to individual
discrimination, the systemic discrimination is not intended or acknowledged by
the performing actors (ibid). This new focus on systemic discrimination has
been seen as a gain since the issue of discrimination then can be discussed without blaming concrete persons for being
racists. On the other hand, this has also
been considered to be a weakness (Rogstad &
Midtbøen, 2009, p. 10).
From an ethnomethodological perspective, it is problematic to reduce this
issue to the play of actor less structures.
Following the perspective of racialization the utterance “We try to teach them
to come in and communicate with us in the kitchen” should primarily be seen as
an echo of the oriental way of thinking, which constructs minority groups as the other in contrast to a complacent we. Thus,
the professional is unconsciously carrying out a dominant thinking and an
institutional routine, without seeing the excluding side effects caused by her
praxis. But from an ethnomethodological perspective, the relationship between
social structure and social interaction is not given or external to the actor
in the Durkheimian sense, Wilson (1992) argues: “Rather, externality and
constraint are members’ accomplishments, and social structure and social
interaction are reflexively related rather than standing in causal or formal
definitional relations to one another” (Wilson, 1992,
p. 27). Institutional rules and routines
are thus not realized by judgemental dopes, but by competent members who are
not naïve about social structures and who know how to utilize various
interactional resources to realize projects in talk.
The site of discrimination is thus neither primarily at the individual level (othering
as an individual cognitive process) or at an abstract cultural level (the
oriental way of thinking) but at the middle level of social interaction where
people enact their daily business, such as socializing each other. Any action
should therefore be appreciated as an
accomplishment in its own right and in
this case, the distinction we/them is
part of an account excusing (Scott &
Lyman, 1968) her action of not noticing a
parent. The care provider could have chosen to produce a different account, for
instance, an account blaming the routine
or her own actions rather than the parents, but she did not (and I for myself
could have responded in a different way too). Hence, in our everyday lives we
all are co-producers of cultures in the settings we inhabit, but luckily, for
organizations willing to scrutinize their practices, change is possible.
References
Andenæs, A. (2011). Chains of care:
Organising the everyday life of young children attending day care. Nordic
Psychology, 63(2),
49-67. https://doi.org/10.1027/1901-2276/a000032
Andersen, C. E., Engen, T. O., Gitz-Johansen, T., Kristoffersen, C. S.,
Obel, L. S., Sand, S., & Zachrisen, B. (2011). Den
flerkulturelle barnehagen i rurale områder [The multicultural kindergarten in
rural areas] Høgskolen i Innlandet.
Berger, P. L., & Luckmann, T. (1967). The social construction of reality: A treatise in the sociology of
knowledge. London:
Penguin.
Bourdieu,
P. (1977). Outline of a theory of practice
(Vol. 16). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511812507
Bundgaard,
H., & Gulløv, E. (2008). Forskel og
fællesskab: Minoritetsbørn i daginstitution. København: Hans Reitzel.
Drew, P., & Sorjonen, M.-L. (1997). Institutional Dialogue. In T. A. E. van Dijk (Ed.), Discourse as Social Interaction. Discourse
Studies: A Multidisciplinary Introduction. Volume 2. London: Sage
Publication.
Døving,
C. A. (2011). Hva
er en minoritet? Retrieved from http://www.hlsenteret.no/kunnskapsbasen/livssyn/minoriteter/hva-er-en-minoritet/hva-er-en-minoritet
Garfinkel,
H. (1967). Studies in Ethnomethodology.
Cambridge: Polity.
Goffman,
E. (1967). Interaction ritual: Essays on
face-to-face behavior. New York: Pantheon Books.
Goodwin,
C., & Heritage, J. (1990). Conversation Analysis. In Annu. Rev. Anthropol. (Vol. 19, pp. 283-307). https://doi.org/10.1146/annurev.an.19.100190.001435
Gulløv, E. (2017). Institution - formaliserede fællesskaber. In E. Gulløv, G. B. Nielsen, & I. W.
Winther (Eds.), Pædagogisk antropologi.
København: Hans
Reitzel Forlag.
Haug, M. (2016). Praksis der hjem
og barnehage møtes i hverdagen - en studie av interaksjon mellom foreldre,
personale og barn. (Master),
Høgskolen i Oslo og Akershus, Oslo.
Heritage,
J. (1984). A Change-of-State Token and Aspects of its Sequential Placement. In
J. M. Atkinson & J. Heritage (Eds.), Structures
of Social Action. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. .
Kamali, M. (2005). Ett europeisk
dilemma: Strukturell/institutionell diskriminering. (SOU 2005: 41).
Kulick,
D., & Schieffelin, B. B. (2008). Language Socialization. In A. Duranti
(Ed.), Wiley Blackwell Companions to
Anthropology Ser.: A Companion to Linguistic Anthropology (1). Williston:
Williston, GB: John Wiley & Sons, Incorporated.
Palludan,
C. (2005). Børnehaven gør en forskel.
København:
Danmarks Pædagogiske Universitets Forlag.
Palludan,
C. (2007). Two Tones: The Core of Inequality in Kindergarten? International Journal of Early Childhood, 39(1),
75-91. https://doi.org/10.1007/BF03165949
Pike,
K. (1967). Language in relation to a
unified theory of the structure of human behavior. The Hague: Mouton. https://doi.org/10.1515/9783111657158
Psathas,
G. (1995). Conversation Analysis: The
Study of Talk-in-Interaction. Los Angeles: SAGE Publications Inc. https://doi.org/10.4135/9781412983792
Rogstad, J., & Midtbøen, A. (2009). Rasisme og diskriminering: Begreper, kontroverser og nye perspektiver.
Oslo: Forskningsrådet.
Rogstad, J., & Midtbøen, A. H. (2010). Den utdannede, den
etterlatte og den drepte: Mot en ny forståelse av rasisme og diskriminering. Sosiologisk
tidsskrift, 18(01), 31-52.
Scott,
M. B., & Lyman, S. M. (1968). Accounts. American
Sociological Review, 33(1), 46-62. https://doi.org/10.2307/2092239
SSB. (2017). Barnehagedekningen fortsetter
å øke. Retrieved from https://www.ssb.no/utdanning/artikler-og-publikasjoner/barnehagedekningen-fortsetter-a-oke
Utdanningsdirektoratet. (2018, 15.02.2018). Nøkkeltallene i Barnehagefakta. Retrieved from https://www.barnehagefakta.no/om-nokkeltallene
Wilson,
T. P. (1992). Social Structure and the Sequential Organization of Interaction.
In D. Boden & D. H. Zimmerman (Eds.), Talk
and Social Structure: Studies in Ethnomethodology and Conversation Analysis
(pp. 23-43).
Wooffitt,
R. (2005). Conversation Analysis and
Discourse Analysis: A Comparative and Critical Introduction: United
Kingdom: Sage Publications Ltd. https://doi.org/10.4135/9781849208765