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This study presents a systematic review of 38 empirical studies about big ideas published between 2010 and 2022 in various disciplines. The review scrutinised the conceptualisation of the big idea in the identified studies and its application in educational practices such as standards, curricula, textbooks, school-based curriculum reforms, and classroom teaching. Additionally, the review synthesised the benefits and challenges of incorporating big ideas into classroom instruction in different subject areas, followed by a methodological review that identified and compared the research approaches employed in the literature. The critical analysis of key findings indicates that the implementation of big ideas in education is still in its infancy stage, with complex issues surrounding its practice and research. These challenges include exploring how big ideas-based education can advance educational equity, addressing deficiencies in assessment strategies and activities, bridging gaps in research evidence concerning the effectiveness of big ideas-based instruction, and assisting teachers in identifying and teaching big ideas through teacher education. The review offers practical recommendations to address these challenges in big ideas-based education and proposes directions for future research. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

STEAM is a coupling of the well-known STEM-disciplines of science, technology, engineering and mathematics with the arts. This conception of education builds on the foundations of STEM-curricula but complements it with a focus on innovation, creativity, novelty etc. Those in favor of STEAM education emphasize the importance of this shifted focus in better preparing the future generations for the complex challenges to come. However, a portion of the discourse on STEAM tends to reduce this approach to education to a means towards market-oriented ends. In opposition to such a discourse and primarily informed by Koestler's work on imagination and discovery in science, art and other domains of human creativity, we develop and defend a pedagogical conception of imagination. By connecting this conception of pedagogical imagination to insights from Tyson Lewis and Peter Hyland, we propose a protocol-based educational practice which can be incorporated in STEAM education. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

While education seeks to develop academic knowledge, there too lies the need for children and young people’s personal, social, emotional, and ethical needs to be met, to develop confidence and autonomy. With ongoing austerity and the closure of universal services such as Children Centres , there is an ever-increasing need for schools to become trauma informed, as they continue to gain recognition as a first line of defence against later mental health issues, warranting earlier and more pervasive intervention and support. As a result, therapeutic approaches and teaching continue to converge in schools in varying capacities. Well-being and academic learning should be regarded in equal measure; however, the application of standalone interventions raises the question of what needs to be considered for mental health and well-being to be authentically trauma informed and threaded into the culture and pedagogy of schools long term. This paper uses existing literature to examine the implications of trauma-informed education in developing a case for compassion-focused pedagogy in schools, considering the benefits and potential barriers to its implementation [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Cognitive science-informed approaches have gained considerable influence in education in the UK and internationally, but not much is known about how teachers perceive cognitive science-informed strategies or enact them within the contexts of their everyday classrooms. In this paper, we discuss the perceptions and experiences of cognitive science-informed strategies of 13 teachers in England. The paper critically explores how the teachers understood and used cognitive science-informed strategies in their teaching, their views of the benefits and challenges for different subjects and groups of learners, and their reflections on supporting factors and barriers for adopting the strategies in their schools. The teachers' accounts illustrate some of the many complexities of adopting cognitive science-informed approaches in real-life educational settings. Drawing on their narratives, the paper emphasises the importance of acknowledging different contextual dimensions and the dynamic interactions between them to understand when and how teachers enact cognitive science-informed approaches in their classrooms. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Practice-oriented educational research is renowned for its impact, both in educational practice and research. Yet, existing studies on the impact of practice-oriented educational research reflect a proliferation of ideas on what impact is, can or should be. This study aims to contribute to an in-depth understanding by establishing a theoretically informed and empirically substantiated conceptualisation of the impact of practice-oriented educational research. Based on current literature, a tentative conceptualisation in the dimensions scope, nature and progress, representing the who, what and when of change, is proposed. The tenability and completeness of this conceptualisation is subsequently investigated in a qualitative empirical study. Based on interviews, individual reflections and small-group discussions, the impact of 10 purposefully selected practice-oriented studies in secondary STEM-education in the Netherlands is compared to the tentative conceptualisation of impact. This results in an empirical substantiation and extension of the tentative conceptualisation. The presented conceptualisation of impact of practice-oriented educational research in terms of scope, covering educational practice and research within the context of a study or beyond, nature, including conceptual, instrumental and symbolic change, and progress, comprising sustainability, timeframe, and stability of change, can facilitate and focus discussions, considerations and analyses of the impact of practice-oriented educational research. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

How does a world of rival victimhoods disrupt our understandings of the educational subject? In which ways do competing claims of victimhood and their connections with justice have an impact on everyday educational practices? These questions are at the heart of this essay. The analysis conceptualizes the affective logic of victimhood as a terrain of struggle over competing claims to suffering, trauma and injury. The argument is that victimhood works by tactically mobilizing effective claims to suffering, trauma or injury for moral and political gains. The paper highlights implications of this analysis for everyday educational practices, discourses and relationships, and discusses the extent to which a pedagogical approach that engages students with the affective claims of victimhood – namely, who claims to be a victim, from which position and to which effects – can offer productive ways of navigating through competing claims of victimhood. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The existence of a gap between educational research and practice, resulting in research that makes only a limited contribution to the improvement of professional practices in education, has been a topic of much discussion. There is widespread agreement among researchers that practice in education should be informed by research evidence. At the same time, other authors have voiced concerns about giving evidence-based practice too prominent a place in educational settings. In this article, we assess the views of expert researchers in the field of education regarding the linking of research and practice in education. Individual, semi-structured interviews were undertaken with twelve experts from Pakistan and the UK, contrasting countries where the issue of the utility of research for educational practice has been much debated. In both countries, there was a strong consensus among the researchers that there are important gaps between research and practice in education. The interviewees made a range of suggestions as to how these gaps might be filled, and we examine these suggestions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study aimed to understand the status of knowledge, attitudes, and educational practice of child sexual abuse (CSA) prevention among primary school teachers in a city of Guangdong province of China in order to provide baseline information for CSA prevention training for teachers. Teachers from 8 schools in a city of Guangdong province were surveyed, in May 2019, via an anonymous self-administered questionnaire. On the whole, primary school teachers had positive attitudes toward CSA prevention, but their knowledge and educational practice for CSA prevention were somewhat limited. Results of multiple logistic regression showed that older teachers (40 years or older) (OR = 1.692. 95%CI 1.135, 2.521), classroom teachers (OR = 1.877. 95%CI 1.269, 2.776), and teachers who had participated in training (OR = 4.293. 95%CI 2.907, 6.339) had more educational practice. The findings in this study could provide useful information for developing further CSA prevention education in primary schools. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Nowadays, the term "interreligiosity" is well-established in discussions about religious education. This paper addresses various current approaches and concepts within interreligious pedagogy in Germany and Austria. On the one hand, it strives to bring order to the wide, impervious variety of previous approaches and on the other hand it identifies existing focal points, main topics and tendencies. The research subjects are theoretic-conceptual models, didactic and methodological approaches, and empirical analyses on applied interreligious projects within pedagogical practice. It is shown that there is an imbalance in the existing literature-namely, the lack of practical orientation. The paper concludes by outlining suggestions on the future of interreligious pedagogical research. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

By recognising young athletes as active socialising agents in their own right and how they experience parents' behaviour, the article contributes knowledge about parent-created educational practices and conditions for players' political socialisation in competitive youth games in grassroots soccer. Parents play an important role in the creation of educational practices and the conditions for young people's political socialisation in sport. Young people's formation of political identities, values, attitudes and norms, their adaption to, learning about and sometimes changes in the political culture of a community are dimensions that have hitherto not been explored to any great extent in youth sport research. Three types of educational practices are identified in which the conditions for political socialisation are shown to be marked by social cohesion, security and respectability; group segregation, selfishness and manipulation; disrespect, hostility and blame. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Background: Referees, parents and coaches are vital for co-creating the educational practice of competitive games in youth sport and influencing young players' behaviour, learning and socialisation within the game. Coaches and parents influence players in different ways in competitive games and their behaviour can be viewed as role-modelling actions that affect players' observational learning and communicate what is regarded as important and valuable. Referees and refereeing is an under-explored field of research; especially the experiences of referees in youth sport and soccer. Purpose: Based on a referee perspective, the aim of the article is to contribute knowledge about the educational practice of competitive games in youth sport with a focus on the pedagogical function of parents, coaches and referees within the context of grassroots youth soccer. Theory: Competitive youth games are approached as play activities conditioned by authority and respect for the game and the referee as a representative of the game and as a person. In the game, players are influenced by the pedagogical function of parents, coaches and referees and their relations direct what is possible to learn and experience. The concepts help us to understand the conditions for competitive youth games and the roles of significant others in co-creating the game as an educational practice. Method: The empirical study is part of a research project called Educating for fair play? In this project, the behaviour of parents and coaches in three grassroots soccer clubs in Sweden was explored during the 2017 sports season based on referees' and players' perspectives. For this article, the empirical data consists of 17 audio-recorded interviews with a total of 27 referees. A five-step qualitative content analysis has been used to analyse the data. Findings and Conclusions: From a referee perspective, the pedagogical function of parents is to act as spectators and as proponents of role respect and good referee relations. They are expected to encourage and praise the team and its players and to facilitate a friendly and holistic learning atmosphere in which all players, even opponents, are supported and included. The pedagogical function of coaches is to safeguard and promote referee respect, focus on their task as team leaders and player developers, facilitate an atmosphere of civility in which the participants in the game treat each other as worthy autonomous human beings and direct the players to focus on playing the game. Referees' pedagogical function is to be authorities and representatives of the game, adopt a learning and improving approach, be game managers and enjoyment facilitators, communicate with and instruct and foster players, coaches and parents. By adjusting the expectations, for example of referees' competence in relation to the level of the competitive game and balancing competitive seriousness and the spirit of play, parents and coaches can co-create an educational practice that emphasises the players' own development and that of their educative experiences. As game managers, communicators and instructors, referees, with the support of parents and coaches, can orchestrate the game and create a joyful atmosphere of learning and development. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper draws on sociological and philosophical work on educational knowledge and expertise to consider what is distinctive about different traditions of educational inquiry. It is argued that an examination of the character of educational knowledge benefits from scrutiny of the relations between specialised and non-specialised forms of knowledge, and an emphasis on distinguishing forms of educational practice in terms of their underpinning socio-epistemic character. With reference to the work of Durkheim, Bernstein and social realism, it is suggested that traditions of educational inquiry can be differentiated by the extent to which they recognise the distinct value of specialised educational knowledge and by which they offer a conceptualisation of educational practice as a specialised activity for which systematic knowledge is necessary. Various traditions of inquiry are briefly explored in these terms (i.e. foundation disciplines, German educational thought and practice-centred traditions). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Issue: Research in education, including health professions education, has long struggled with the competing concerns of academic and practice-based stakeholders. Inspired partially by the work of Stokes and other theorists in science and technology studies, we propose that discussions about compelling research in health professions education might be usefully advanced by considering what it would mean if the community framed itself as a knowledge-producing field instead of aligning itself with either disciplinary or practical interests. Evidence: Efforts to foreground disciplinary or practical interests in education research have been unproductive, leading to the privileging of one group's expertise at the expense of the other. Currently proposed principles and practices for responding to the divergence between these interests, such as knowledge translation or practitioner inquiry, have yielded comparatively little in the way of mutual satisfaction. Implications: As a field, health professions education research would not privilege either disciplinary or practical interests, nor would it attempt any sort of definitive blueprint for resolution to the tension. Rather it would regard these interests as inherently interconnected and, therefore, always in tension to varying degrees. The challenge for a field is not to resolve that tension but to harness it in productive ways through collaboration, negotiation, and compromise, through ever-shifting engagements that will not necessarily be comfortable but will nonetheless foster knowledge that resonates with all parts of the community. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Current landscapes of curriculum discourse and educational practice are examined by focusing on co-evolutions of metaphors for knowledge, learning and teaching across four prominent ‘frames’—namely, Standardized Education, Authentic Education, Democratic Citizenship Education and Systemic Sustainability Education. It is argued that these frames become compelling and resilient (or repulsive and nonsensical)—not because of what they explicitly assert, but because of the coherence of their implicit webs of vocabulary, metaphor, image and ideological association. While some of these frames/webs may be embraced as complementary, more often they are treated as conflicting or incoherent—in part, it would seem, because of tensions among their mainly implicit substrates of figurative association. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Over the past few decades, the number of people enrolled in doctoral study has increased dramatically across the world. In practical terms, this has meant that universities now receive increasingly diverse students with regard to ethnicity, age, language, culture, and background preparedness for higher degree study. Students can, and often do, begin their doctorates with scant understanding of the precise expectations and rigorous demands of thesis writing. Yet, regardless of academic discipline, successful completion of a doctorate requires a written thesis. To help students master thesis writing requirements, a proliferation of self-help writing books, blogs, specific writing techniques, and programmes have emerged. This paper describes an approach developed at a New Zealand university where a generic doctoral writing programme, the Doctoral Writing Conversation, has evolved to make explicit to students the implicit language understanding that accomplished academic writers use to produce text. Utilising the idea of language as a tool to mediate understanding, the paper will explore how the programme is structured and functions but will also describe some of the insights I have gained along the way. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this article the authors attempt to understand and apprehend the dynamic transnational movement of the appropriation of Ovide Decroly’s ideas and its ‘flight to Brazilian lands’. They work with the assumption that Decroly’s ideas, entangled in different levels, are articulating and interacting with the Brazilian cultural and educational environment. The intention is to get close to the classroom and to have a glimpse at the practices inside. To approach classroom practices, a traditional archive has been chosen, which is constituted by the pedagogical press, to have a thorough look within: pedagogical periodicals and pedagogical collections, and analyses of two books and six articles concerning Decroly’s ideas published in Brazil between 1927 and 1931. Methodological discussions are first introduced, and the substantial contents of the books and articles concerning Decroly’s ideas under study are then presented. In the analyses the authors debate what happened to Decroly’s ideas when Brazilian teachers and intellectuals used them. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Drawing on a one-year-long ethnographic reader-response study of a book club activity in a Swedish school, the present article offers a narratological analysis of books used in the book club, as well as some didactical implications for practice. The analysis of the books shows a preponderance of male protagonists, foreign settings, and first-person and omniscient narrators. The books used were characterized by classic folktale plots. A majority of the books were about animals and adventures. And, many of them dealt with existential themes. When it comes to leading book clubs, the author suggests keeping in mind that struggling readers might be the greatest book lovers, and that stereotypical texts can be used to counteract stereotypes. Interpretations of what is “real” emerge in the book club were shown to be potential starting points for discussions on the conditions of fiction. To avoid ideological dilemmas, it is important to make clear what the aim of a book club is. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Introduction: The General Medical Council (GMC) requires all doctors to undertake annual appraisal for all roles for which they hold a licence to practise. General Practitioner (GP) educational supervisors (ES)in the North of Scotland have undertaken annual ES peer-appraisal since 2002 which focuses on their role as ES and is separate to GMC appraisal. Aim: To investigate whether participation in annual peer appraisal by GP trainers had affected their professional practice and sense of community Methods: Focus group methodology was utilised, supported by written reflective narratives. Thirty-five educational supervisors participated in three focus groups, moderated by educators from the north region of Scotland Deanery. The data included 35 narratives, flip charts and field notes. These were analysed using a thematic approach. Results: Thirty-five trainers participated and themes emerged around four areas: organisational, process, outcomes and challenges. Due to its formative peer related features, peer appraisal was more valued than mandatory annual NHS appraisal. The value of a personally known peer as appraiser emerged as a major recurrent theme. Positive affective and effective outcomes were described by several participants. These included feeling more valued and confident. Some reported empowering and motivating effects to implement changes and tackle difficult situations. Some felt that appraisal added to the sense of community by developing new relationships and deepening existing ones. The risk of collusion was raised in several narratives and explored more deeply during focus group discussions. There was agreement that the process could be improved by making explicit what to do if concerns were identified. Discussion: This study demonstrated the importance of peer appraisal for GP trainers, particularly in the context of locally based valued and trusted trainer groups. It affects their professional practice as educators and deepens their sense of community. This is of particular relevance to current discussions on medical educator appraisal in the context of re-approval and revalidation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article reveals the nature of actions, discussions and relationships which helped forge school-community partnerships for engaged student learning and wider community participation for students and families living under difficult socio-economic circumstances. Specifically, the article draws upon interviews with key personnel and staff involved in the establishment and enactment of a ‘Community Partnerships’ programme to help improve the opportunities for students attending a primary school serving a low socio-economic urban community in south-east Queensland, Australia. Drawing upon the notion of educational practice as a product of ongoing interactions between particular actions (doings), discussions (sayings) and relationships (relatings), which both constitute and are responsive to particular conditions or ‘architectures’ for practice, the article reveals how the conceptualisation, establishment and consolidation of the community partnerships programme was dependent upon specific ‘relatings’ between key district and school personnel, the actions/‘doings’ of these personnel and ongoing ‘sayings’/dialogue about their work. Collectively, these ‘doings’, ‘sayings’ and ‘relatings’ all helped to stimulate new conditions – ‘practice architectures’ – for improved opportunities for students and their families. Teacher education informed by such theorising of community partnerships as the product of specific actions, dialogue and relationship-building is vital for developing improved understandings of such interactions and partnerships over time. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Leadership is a highly complex activity, as leaders respond to increasing diversity and external accountability. Additionally, there is increased recognition that leadership is deeply contextual, sensitive to macro-politics of systems and micro-politics of individual schools. In Ontario, Canada, the school improvement effort is focused on raising student achievement and ensuring equitable outcomes. The current provincial education policies across Canada require that principals focus on (1) increasing the proportion of students who meet educational expectations and (2) reducing the 'achievement gaps' amongst sub-groups of students within the public school system. Despite these efforts, in Ontario, schools continue to encounter difficulty in meeting the needs of all their students. A full pursuit of factors related to differences to students' backgrounds and abilities is beyond the scope of this article. Rather, this article is concerned with how school can adopt Karl Popper's theory of learning for school improvement efforts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article considers practice for environmental education from the perspective of the material turn by taking the reader along on an outdoor learning session in a park. We present a fictional walk where we encounter plants, trees, wasp-orchids, stones, walking sticks, plastic bags, people, weather, and kites, each of which has a story to tell that demonstrates ontological immanence and the material process of being alive. These stories help suggest some practical ways in which environmental education can be reoriented from an essentialist paradigm to one of becoming, tackling prevailing conceptions of the human mind as disembodied from the world. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The learning child, the child that is the object of interest through modernity and into mutated modernity, in the knowledge economy, is a digital age identity of great interest. Talk about childhood and the digital age invokes a range of questions about what is happening at this time and with these technologies and that creates more or less of a distinction that makes it both possible and necessary to start or to continue talking. This article identifies and engages with different positions in the debates on digital childhood. A range of philosophical questions are presented and their importance to the debates are explored. A series of metaphors and examples are presented in order to play, in a serious way, with the meanings and experiences and narratives of digital childhoods. To explore these questions it is worth considering a politics of digital childhoods and the ebb and flow of perceived tensions--of the sense that there is a problem with other ways of thinking about digital childhoods that are not accepted, not approved. That this talk might have the quality of a debate orients us to the probability that there will be significant differences in relation to not just the positions that can and should be taken in relation to children's digital lives but also what is meant by a digital age and digital lives. The focus of this article is constructing an overview of the debates around digital childhood and the ways in which the work of a philosophical line of questioning might contribute to the debate. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article presents a case study of the internationalisation of an Engineering School at a leading Swedish University. The case study is an attempt to sketch out a more qualitative analytical approach to the study of internationalisation, focusing on the interplay between agency and structure and policy and practice as constructed by actors on the 'meso' and 'micro' levels of the organisation. We aim to provide a contribution to existing empirical studies that have usually focused on the national and institutional level of policy setting and implementation without adequately taking the perspective of local actors or local organisational cultures into account. The results of the case study show that internationalisation is materialised in many forms within the School, sometimes as a policy or a set of practices derived from the agency of specific actors (administrators or academic leaders), but equally as specific, varied local educational practices and cultural meanings construed within various micro cultures of academics working directly through their own global-local networks. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper focuses on discourses of coaching in high performance sports. Through three interviews with a youth swimming coach, I explore ways of constructing coaching practice. I examine coaching as an educational practice and use discourse analysis as an analytic framework. The notion of interpretative repertoires is employed as a specific theoretical concept to consider the linguistic resources that the coach draws upon. The results suggest that a variety of resources exist to make sense of coaching. Interpretative repertoires promoting alternative views of performance (i.e. not simply winning), as well as sustainable repertoires that emphasize well-being, learning for life and an equitable coach-athlete relationship, may provide alternative ways of thinking about coaching elite youth sports. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article is the second of a two-part investigation, the first part of which was published in Ethics and Education, vol. 5, issue 2, 2010, under the title 'Preface to an ethics of education as a practice in its own right'. Although it builds on the arguments of that 'preface', this second part of the investigation can be read as a stand-alone essay. It begins with a brief review of a new subordination of educational practice achieved by a neo-liberal tenor in international educational reforms in recent decades in Western societies. The practical context for the essay however is that failure of many of these reforms, like the failure of neo-liberal dominance in socio-economic policy, has given rise to emergent opportunities where inspirations for educational debate and policy-making are concerned. Arguing for the uptake of such opportunity, the ethical tenor of education as a practice in its own right is explored under four headings: (1) review and clarification of the inherent purposes of education as a practice; (2) investigation of educationally productive pathways that are characteristic of education as a practice in its own right; (3) elucidation of a recognisable family of virtues that arise from that practice itself; (4) exploration of the kinds of relationships through which these virtues, and their educational fruits, are nourished. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article offers suggestions for responding towards adversity in educational practice. It mentions the need to be prepared and follow the given guidelines; and recommendations to be real for high achievers focusing on importance of excellence. It also highlights the need to incorporate traits that demands being flexible, and forward looking.

Education is a technology, a production system whose elements comprise material, linguistic and conceptual inventions. This multi-dimensional sense of educational technology is useful whenever attempts are made to understand educational practice. To this end, my paper examines a small corner of the historical or technological record, 'patents of invention', a set of sources that has seldom, if ever, been used in English-language histories of education. To evaluate this source, my attention focuses on the 'abridgements', published between 1855 and 1930, where patent applications were grouped according to their use (e.g. as 'furniture' or 'stationery'); and the diversity of these records will be illustrated by reference to an invention - the school desk - that was prominent over the same period. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper reports on a case study of a supportive learning environment initiative (SLEI) for students on health and social care undergraduate programmes in one English university. It involved the development of small scale support projects that are firmly grounded in the outcomes of prior research as well as the ongoing experience of students and staff at the institution. The paper begins by identifying common themes which point towards principles and strategies for educational change though a brief review of three concepts that are central to the initiative: 'action research', the 'learning environment' and 'change management'. The account of the SLEI focuses on some of the processes of change management that were deployed and the subsequent discussion draws on the theoretical review to reflect critically on possible lessons for the promotion and management of localised change in higher education. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Within a post-apartheid educational ethos that emphasizes multiculturalism and interculturalism, there is a growing sense in South Africa that prescriptivism is to be avoided. However, the perception of the teacher as moral exemplar entails an interesting ambivalence: the teacher as champion of tolerance, as facilitator but not prescriber of views, values, and behaviour, whose 'comportment' nonetheless encompasses the idea of an ethical identity as well as more technical aspects of intellectual virtue. Does the (German) notion of vorleben—'to live (one's life) as an example or guide'; 'to exemplify (good) practice'—illuminate an understanding of a teacher/facilitator professional identity in the South African post-apartheid context? This study analyses this idea and its intersections and dissonances with role-modelling, modelling and practice, humanistic education, African traditional education and ubuntu, the African principle of human interdependence. Vorleben is argued to be able to enhance our understanding of the duties and obligations of the professional educator. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this article we discuss the production of social distinctions within an institutional setting. Based on ethnographic fieldwork in a pre-school institution in Denmark, we focus on the interpersonal encounters between ethnic minority children, their parents and the staff. More specifically we explore an apparent paradox in daily practice where, on the one hand, staff attempt to mute differences between children on the assumption that all children are equal and should be treated as such, while, on the other, distinctions are in practice established when children behave in ways considered inappropriate in relation to their own long-term interest. Our data indicate that differences related to social class and ethnicity mutually reinforce each other in the institutional context, resulting in the marking of Middle Eastern children as somehow different. This legitimises an educational effort to compensate practices of upbringing in the families by teaching these children how to behave in ways considered ‘proper’ and appropriate for their future lives in the Danish welfare state. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]