Möten mellan förskolepedagoger och vårdnadshavare med utländsk bakgrund: Motstånd, anpassning och nyskapande i det tredje rummet

Abstract

This article examines everyday encounters between preschool educators and guardians with migrant backgrounds in Swedish preschools, focusing on how resistance, adaptation, and emergent practices are articulated in the in-between space where they meet. The study is informed by Bhabha’s theory of the “third space” and perspectives from linguistic ethnography. It is based on semi-structured interviews with eight preschool educators and eight guardians at three preschools in multicultural areas in Sweden. The analysis shows that educators often expect guardians to adapt to Swedish cultural norms, preschool routines, and implicit institutional rules. When such adaptation does not occur, guardians risk being positioned as “the Other” and understood through a deficit perspective. Guardians, in turn, both resist and adapt to preschool expectations: they may question practices such as outdoor play in bad weather, written information and the use of interpreters, while also emphasising the importance of learning Swedish and understanding how to live in Sweden. Transformative possibilities emerge when educators adopt a welcoming and flexible approach, invest in relationships, draw on multilingual and multimodal resources, and when multilingual staff act as linguistic and cultural brokers. The findings highlight how everyday encounters may either reproduce or challenge processes of othering and point to the need for reflexive and intercultural practices in preschool, teacher education, and policy.