Project EDUCAREplus
Milieu-Specific Self-Views and Practices of Children, Parents, and Educators in Education and Care Settings of Early and Middle Childhood
The research project aims at a better understanding of the persisting social inequality in children’s school success. The main focus is on socioeconomic differences in attitudes, beliefs, and practices of children, parents, and educators with regard to education and care in early and middle childhood.
The issue of social inequality in children’s educational opportunities has come to the fore in recent years, especially with regard to the question of how families, preschool institutions, and primary schools contribute to the (re-)production of educational inequality. To date, however, it is widely unknown how parents, kindergarten educators, teachers, and children themselves view their practices in education and care settings as well as their opportunities to overcome disadvantages and to reduce inequalities. Without a profound analysis of the perspectives and actions of those groups of actors in social stratification and educational processes across various types of education and care settings, we do not fully understand what causes the persisting social inequality in children’s school success.
The EDUCAREplus study – as a follow-up of the study EDUCARE – remedies this gap by analyzing the attitudes, beliefs, and practices of children, parents, educators, and teachers with regard to education and care in early and middle childhood. We assume that, first, actors’ views and practices in education and care settings largely depend on the characteristics of the social environment that shapes their daily lives. Second, we hypothesize the milieu-specific views and practices to have long lasting effects on educational opportunities of children between 2 and 12 years old.
Selected Publications
de Moll, F. (2017). Soziale Ungleichheit jenseits der Kindertageseinrichtung: Milieuspezifische Bildungs- und Betreuungspraxen von Familien mit 2–6-jährigen Kindern. Pädagogische Rundschau. Manuscript submitted for publication.
de Moll, F. & Betz, T. (2016). Accounting for children’s agency in research on educational inequality: the influence of children’s own practices on their academic habitus in elementary school. In F. Esser, M. S. Baader, T. Betz & B. Hungerland (Eds.), Reconceptualising agency and childhood. New perspectives in childhood studies (pp. 271–289). New York: Routledge.
Funding
