Let's play together: Cultural diversity in early childhood education and care in the Netherlands

The increasing cultural diversity poses major challenges to current societies. One of these challenges concerns the early education gap between children from non-Western immigrant families and their native Dutch peers. Worldwide, and also in the Netherlands, early childhood education and care (ECEC) programs are initiated to reduce education disparities. A key question is whether this policy is effective. Besides posing challenges, cultural diversity can also be an asset in ECEC. Cultural diversity can enrich ECEC in several ways. First, in culturally diverse classrooms, children will have more opportunities for inter-cultural interaction to learn about diversity. Second, teachers from different cultural backgrounds may hold child-rearing beliefs that can enrich existing beliefs and practices in ECEC. A key question is whether cultural diversity is indeed a resource. This dissertation reports four studies on ECEC in the Netherlands. The first two studies focused on the effects of current ECEC policy in the Netherlands. The first study, using a sample of 2454 two-to-four-year-old children, showed that children from cultural minority and low-SES backgrounds used less often center-based child day care and more often preschools. Quality measures obtained in 279 classrooms, showed that these children on average experienced higher quality ECEC than their peers. The second study examined the effects of ECEC quality, curriculum, and classroom composition on children’s language and math outcomes at age 5.5, controlling for age 2 vocabulary and selective attention skills. In a two-group analysis, only small effects of ECEC were found for the non-disadvantaged group. The disadvantaged children, however, were found to benefit significantly from higher ECEC quality, a stronger educational emphasis in the provided curriculum, and of mixed classrooms with neither too few nor too many disadvantaged children. The findings of these two studies suggest that the current targeted ECEC approach in the Netherlands benefits children who need early educational support most. The third and fourth study addressed cultural diversity as a resource for pedagogical quality of ECEC. In the third study, 57 teachers of native Dutch and immigrant Moroccan-Dutch, Turkish-Dutch, Surinamese-Dutch, and Antillean-Dutch backgrounds were interviewed about their child-rearing beliefs and observed while engaging in a play activity with children. The Turkish-Dutch and Moroccan-Dutch teachers mentioned concepts relating to group processes more often than the Dutch teachers did, with the Surinamese- and Antillean-Dutch teachers falling in-between, and they showed correspondingly higher levels of support of group processes during children’s play. In the fourth study, 37 teachers and 120 2- to 4-year-old children were observed with the CLASS-Toddler, an instrument widely used for quality assessment in ECEC, and two new observation instruments. The new instruments were based on cross-cultural research into (non-Western) sociocentric models of child-rearing. Teachers’ support of group processes was found to be positively related to the CLASS and to children’s collaborative play. The CLASS, in contrast, was not positively related to collaborative play. These findings suggest that ECEC quality evaluation with standard instruments such as the CLASS can be enriched by adding group-centered indicators of classroom quality based in non-Western models of child-rearing.