Due to the growing number of children with migration experience, early childhood educational institutions are confronted with challenges and tasks that have been entirely unknown or extremely rare in their history. These institutions increasingly face the expectation that they possess sufficient background and training to successfully integrate these children, linguistically and culturally, so that they qualify for preschool. Many of these institutions are now challenged by a society that is, to an ever increasing extent, linguistically, culturally, and religiously plural. This challenge has given rise to the aim of dealing with this diversity in a qualified manner due to the importance of integrating children into society. Particularly urban centers, with their large populations, are experiencing an increase in linguistic, cultural, and religious diversity. The awareness of the crucial role of institutions specialised in supporting the process of integrating children with migration experience is expanding, and in many urban centers attending early childhood educational institutions has come to be viewed as a right that applies to every child. The aim is that children with migration experience attending an early childhood educational institution – regardless of their cultural and religious origin – should have the same educational opportunities as children in the majority society, which would enable them to develop the same capacity as all other adult members of the majority society to actively participate in society. In spite of public debates focusing on cultural and religious diversity in kindergarten, questions concerning integration in the field of early childhood education are rarely discussed. Increasing funding for early childhood educational institutions is not enough. Instead a profound dialogue on and analysis of the need to equip the institutions with special competences and capabilities for dealing with the current linguistic religious, and diversity must be undertaken. The growing number of kindergarten groups is putting pressure on public institutions and cities and forcing the government to deal with this topic consequentially, and not simply to reconsider measures of supervision, but rather to rethink the infrastructure of these institutions.

About the Conference

Questions related to integration in institutions dealing with early childhood education have not yet been sufficiently addressed within the scientific community or by government-run institutions. Within the scope of the proposed conference “Migration and Integration in Institutions Concerned with Early Childhood Education" (23-25 November 2018), an extensive discussion of questions concerning the specific position of early childhood education in the process of migration will be undertaken. Renowned academics and participants from a wide range of disciplines and interdisciplinary fields will focus on questions that are relevant to developing the competences and capabilities of early childhood educational institutions in particular with regard to linguistic, cultural and religious diversity.

Through the participation of the most prestigious scholars in this field in Europe, the proposed conference seeks to address issues of relevance to the quality development of elementary educational institutions with religious and cultural diversity, such as:

To answer those questions, experts in the disciplines of politics, educational practice, education and pedagogy from the all over the EU will be invited. Moreover the conference provides an important opportunity for scholarly Exchange.