Globalisation and migration paved the way for an increased cultural diversity in today’s societies. This societal change entails challenges for educators and teachers in (pre)schools. The increasing pluralism, in particular multiculturalism with its linguistic and cultural diversity is raising the need for a customized curriculum within Early Childhood Education and Care services (ECEC). Especially, new knowledge, evidence informed tools and good practices in order to accommodate and accompany the growth of all children. Therefore, the aim of this final publication is to summarize the purposes, methods, findings and good practices of the project Intercultural Early Childhood Education and Care Curriculum Design for Professionals (I.ECEC) for educative professionals, practitioners and high school students. This compilation implies several activities covering both national (partner countries) and international (EU) levels, namely: literature review, data collection, analysis and description of the good practices regarding ECEC (Early Childhood Education and Care) in intercultural perspective.
The first chapter concerns an introduction regarding the importance of the Intercultural Early Childhood Education and Care project with reference towards its predecessor the Multicultural Early Childhood Education project. A systematic literature review revealed a major gap in the literature regarding social inclusion in intercultural early childhood education. Therefore, it was interesting to concretize the knowledge and good practices about this topic in order to contribute to the work field of educators and practice oriented scientific research. Afterwards, the research methodology is discussed in the second chapter. The final publication has an exploratory character that aims to understand and foster dealing with social inclusion of disadvantaged children. In order to obtain an answer to this question, action research as a participatory way of doing research were chosen. Both is explained next to the research design; data collection; respondents; and data analysis. The good practices and research findings is discussed in the four consecutive modules in order to answer the main question, namely Module 1: Complex and Diverse Societies; Module 2: Diversity in ECEC-Services; Module 3: Inclusion and Participation; Module 4: Flexible Practice, Innovation and Transformation. The core of this final project; the initial results and suggestions for further projects is finally compiled in the conclusion.
In addition, we developed a teacher’s manual in particular for the implementation of the good practices in own educational practice.