02 The politics of belonging: Educators’ interpretations of communities, positions, and borders in preschool

The aim of this paper is to advance knowledge about the politics of belonging in Norwegian preschools by exploring how educators describe and consider processes of belonging in their educational practice. In educational research, the dominating focus has been on the sense of belonging and children’s emotional bonding to others. Here belonging is approached as a relational and power-loaded phenomenon entangled with ideologies, politics, ethical values, and the positions people occupy in their daily lives. We regard preschools as arenas for constructing and negotiating borders for various communities and to determine who is regarded as inside and outside these borders. Our analysis revealed that participants primarily focused on maintaining a preschool community that included all children and their parents. This taken for granted hegemonic preschool community represented the majority culture of society and, therefore, the significant values of the preschool. This community recurred across the data as the centre of how participants constructed and interpreted borders and the hub around which other communities circled. Preventing children’s exclusion and enhancing their belonging are complex matters. The challenge for educators is to critically examine how processes related to values, othering, and belonging may play out in various communities in early years settings.