The Utrecht Virtual Learning Environment project: Educational partnerships in multicultural preschools

The increasing cultural and linguistic diversity in European countries leads to new challenges for current education systems. One important challenge is establishing trustful educational partnerships with parents from diverse backgrounds. This holds especially true for Early Childhood Education and Care centres (ECEC), where parents are introduced to the education system for the first time. The Utrecht Virtual Learning Environment (U-VLO) project is a small-scale project that explores whether an educational digital tool can help to improve the educational partnerships between parents and a preschool in a multicultural environment in the Netherlands. The digital tool in the current study aims at (a) improving the engagement of parents by incorporating parents as important resources for (b) enriching the preschool practices with a cultural and multilingual focus. The current project follows the principles of Design-Based Research and describes the iterative process of designing and implementing the digital tool, together with the preschool (two preschool teachers working in four classrooms) and parents, to collaboratively create intercultural content via the digital tool. These bottom-up implementations, combined with the results of observations and evaluations amongst teachers and parents, show that it is possible to implement a digital tool in the specific local context. However, many factors and prerequisites, both social and technical, need to be taken into account before the tool can impact the existing partnerships. Clear implications for theory and practice focusing on improving educational partnerships in multicultural and multilingual settings for young children, and the use of innovative digital tools herein, are provided.