Abstract: In its political ambitions and pedagogical spirit to address an increasingly diverse population, the Swedish national curriculum for the preschool contains contradictory or even conflicting goals. On the one hand, the curriculum stipulates openness to, tolerance for and appreciation of cultural, ethnic, religious and social differences, and respect for the unique background of children. On the other hand, it stresses universal human rights... [...] Read more

Abstract: Drawing on a preschool digitalization project, this article presents the findings from a survey of 75 Swedish preschool heads. One main question guided the survey: how do Swedish preschool heads describe the use and usefulness of digital tools for interaction with parents? These findings are discussed in regard to intercultural differences, intercultural communication competence, and discursive blind spots, where two additional questions are... [...] Read more

Abstract: Recently there has been much debate as to which foods Swedish preschools should serve. This text explores preschool teachers’ approaches to parents’ dietary requests. The empirical material consists of 14 focus group interviews with 41 preschool teachers from two areas of Stockholm. Results suggest that cultural and religious differences pertaining to food and diet requests lead to dilemmas and conflicts which are handled with instrumental... [...] Read more

Abstract: Growing migration to Poland over the past decade has heightened the need for social service professionals to work effectively with culturally diverse populations. Although intercultural competence has been widely theorised in Western contexts, its application within Central and Eastern European institutional settings remains underexplored. This study seeks to examine how intercultural competence is understood and enacted by Polish social... [...] Read more

Abstract: We compared French speaking and South Asian (SA) immigrant families having preschool children in an English speaking region in Canada, with regard to the parents’ attitudes towards minority language (ML) maintenance, ML use at home, and exposure of children to ML media. Parents in both groups had positive attitudes about language maintenance, however, SA parents were less hopeful that their children would retain their ML and pass it on to... [...] Read more