As European societies become increasingly diverse and democracy faces growing pressure, early childhood classrooms play a crucial role in fostering inclusion and equal opportunities. Creating learning environments where children from different origins, national backgrounds, socio-economic contexts, genders, and abilities feel valued is essential for supporting their development and participation. Unacknowledged biases among educational professionals can negatively affect inclusion and diversity in education and may lead to creating a hostile learning environment in which children from certain groups are marginalized and deprived of equal learning opportunities, and stereotypes and prejudices are reinforced. Studies across Europe found, for example, that prejudiced teacher attitudes enlarge the achievement gap between ethnic minority and majority pupils (Costa et al., 2021); that educators’ biases can decrease their attention towards children with lower language skills or lower socio-economic status (Albers et al., 2013; Duthois et al., 2026) or children with special needs (Schell et al., 2025). While there is a consensus that greater inclusion and diversity in classrooms cannot be achieved without qualified teachers equipped with anti-bias competences, multiple studies have shown that practitioners often feel insufficiently prepared to teach in diverse contexts and require further professionalization (OECD, 2025).

These considerations have informed an ongoing research and development project, 'Anti-Bias Education for Early Childhood Teachers: Learning Through Video Coaching' (ABC4T), which will be the focus of this symposium. Conducted by researchers from Belgium, Norway, Poland, Austria and Spain within the Erasmus+ framework, the project aims to contribute to the strengthening of early childhood educators' anti-bias competences by constructing a professional development program (PDP) based on video coaching. The procedure employed is the Educational Design Research (McKenney & Reeves, 2012), comprising three phases: analysis, design and evaluation. Video coaching is a professional development approach in which educators record teaching episodes and engage in sustained, video-based one-to-one or group discussions under the guidance of a coach (van der Linden & McKenney, 2020). This procedure is promising in deepening early childhood educators' understanding of their own implicit beliefs and daily practices, thereby supporting learning about diversity and inclusion (Migliarini et al., 2019).

The objective of this symposium is to share and discuss the project's insights and preliminary results. The symposium comprises six papers divided into two sessions, guided by the following research questions:

• What are the needs of early childhood educators in Austria, Belgium, Norway, Poland and Spain in the field of anti-bias education? (Session 1),
• How can video coaching be employed in a professional development program to support educators’ anti-bias competences? (Session 2). 

The three papers in the first session focus on the findings from the initial phase of the PDP project, in which the needs of early childhood educators regarding anti-bias education were assessed through quantitative (Paper 1) and qualitative (Papers 2 and 3) research with educators and student teachers in the five participating countries. The second session concerns the PDP design process, with a specific focus on video coaching as an approach to supporting teachers’ professional learning. The first paper discusses the findings from a scoping review of literature on video-based guidance in early childhood education. The remaining papers concentrate on the process of developing the PDP. Paper 2 discusses the results of a pilot of a video coaching program conducted in Belgium, while Paper 3 presents the development process and the preliminary version of a PDP constructed in the framework of the present international project in Belgium, Norway and Poland. Taken together, these papers offer a comprehensive overview of a novel approach to supporting educators in developing competences necessary for working in diverse classrooms, in the interest of social justice in early childhood education.

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