The symposium aims to shed light on language policies and practices in early childhood education in European migration societies by juxtaposing case studies from five national contexts. It highlights how language policies in early childhood education in different national and regional contexts are negotiated by relevant actors (e.g. parents, educational professionals, policy-makers, politicians, and stakeholders) and how they connect to educational practices. In addition, the symposium aims at examining the links between institutional and family language policies and practices (Schwartz 2019) and how responsibilities are negotiated between different actors. Preschools and other structures of early childhood education are the first institutional sites where children receive language education and there are competing normative attitudes towards language practices and language learning and teaching in these contexts. An examination of how societal and political expectations and prescriptions are reflected in institutional practices is therefore of central importance for a better understanding of the societal relevance of language in migration societies. 

The aims are, firstly, to uncover the different national and regional language ideologies that inform language policies in early childhood education in different contexts and to relate these to one another. Secondly, we will analyse interactions between professionals, parents and children in order to reconstruct which linguistic resources are used in which contexts and with which actors, and we will examine which expectations, prescriptions, norms and attributions underlie these interactions. Thirdly, we will reconstruct how educational professionals engage with social hierarchisations of languages and with societal power relations both in their professional practices and reflections. On this basis, we will discuss how professional practices in early childhood education can contribute to overcoming discrimination and exclusion. 

Theoretically, we draw on approaches that conceive multilingualism as the interplay of linguistic resources, practices and ideologies (Androutsopoulos 2018). We see languages as resources that are distributed in unequal ways in social networks and discursive spaces, and whose values are socially constructed under specific sociohistorical conditions (Heller 2007). We also consider teachers' approaches to multilingualism and multilingual practices such as translanguaging (García & Lin 2017), as relevant for students’ sense of belonging and well-being (Van Der Wildt et al. 2017). Methodologically, we focus on ethnographic approaches, since they allow for studying concrete and immediate actions and consider how these are embedded within a wider socio-political context (Panagiotopoulou 2017). We also include discourse-analytical approaches for the study of language policy (Johnson 2011) and examine possible links between both approaches to uncover how macro-level language policy and micro-level educational practices interrelate. The papers of part I and part II of the symposium assemble findings from ethnographic and discourse-analytical research projects conducted in five European countries. This will allow for comparative reflections on how language policies and practices in early childhood education across these contexts. 

Part II: The presentations investigate the interrelation of language policies and practices in different national contexts. The first presentation draws on ethnographic methods to examine language practices in preschools in the Italian province South Tyrol, and how they link to the (re)production, negotiation or transformation of social difference. The second presentation presents an ethnographically informed case study and examines the changing discourse on pedagogy of a teacher in Finland who moved from a Finnish-speaking educational background to work with children with multiple language backgrounds. The third presentation investigates how educators and children in a day nursery in a German inner-city district engage with home languages and examines the interplay between language practices and policies on a micro, meso and macro level.

The discussant will reflect on the potentials of ethnographic and discourse-analytical research approaches for investigating language policies and practices in preschools in the European context.

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