Meaning to belong, belonging for meaning: How participation matters across three preschool classrooms

Notions of equality and equal opportunity in educational settings are often much contested in educational debates and much researched in educational inquiry. Both the debates and the inquiry tend to focus on the upper grades of K-12 settings and on higher education settings. This study considers issues related to educational equality beginning with the following question: When and where might a student have his/her first experience of educational inequality? The current line of inquiry proposes that experience of educational inequality may first emerge in preschool. This study explores ideas related to equality in early education settings as a way of understanding the factors that influence children's early schooling experiences. It begins with the premise that the promise of educational equality begins to be realized through the ability to participate effectively in educational settings.This project describes the experiences of preschool children across three diverse pre-kindergarten classrooms of varying philosophical and pedagogical emphases. Over the course of a year of fieldwork, observing children engaged in structured and routine activities in these classrooms has enabled an understanding of how they learn to participate in the preschool classroom and of the socialization practices employed by teachers to meet particular developmental and educational goals for particular children. These observational data suggest that three broad constructs influence how children navigate their classroom experiences and adjust to the classroom: (1) participation styles and structures, (2) the cultivation of a sense of belonging, and (3) individual children's development or assignment of particular classroom reputations.First, in adjusting to the classroom, children have various ways of learning and understanding the classroom's participation structures and are taught in a number of different ways to engage with and find a place for themselves in those structures. Second, the relative sense of belonging emerging from this learning and understanding, and how that learning and understanding enables particular modes of participation shapes how children adjust to the classroom. Third, children come to be identified over time with a particular reputation or manner of engaging in classroom activities and these reputations tend to shape and reinforce particular modes of participation in individual children which has implications for how they adjust to the classroom.A consideration of children's classroom experiences suggests that several important factors impact how children participate in, feel a sense of belonging in, and therefore adjust to the classroom: how teachers engage with and organize participation for children matters how peers engage with and organize participation for one another in the classroom context matters classroom composition matters children's individual dispositions and learning styles matter and, perhaps most importantly, how each of these factors interacts matters a great deal in shaping children's early school experiences. As one of the primary goals of this study is to explore ideas of relative equality in early education settings, it describes the dynamic interactions and influences of these factors as they relate to children's early experiences in school.