Children as Social Butterflies: Navigating Belonging in a Diverse Swiss Kindergarten (Hardcover) (ISBN-13: 9781978836990)

Children as Social Butterflies examines how kindergarten children experience, negotiate, and claim belonging in a diverse and stigmatized Swiss neighborhood. Schools as formative instances of social belonging are particularly important where children with different migration histories are educated together. Childhood scholar Ursina Jaeger followed individual children in a kindergarten class from day one of their school enrollment and accompanied them to extracurricular activities, to ballet classes, to their children's rooms, to the social welfare office, or on family visits abroad. Based on data from several years of this child-centered and multisited research, Children as Social Butterflies offers a vivid ethnography with unique insights into the everyday lives of young children in a diverse neighborhood. The book provides an analytical language informed by theories of social differentiation to grasp complex configurations of social belonging and shows the full potential of ethnographic research with young children. Jaeger thus offers a dynamic reading of migration, schooling, and childhood that is strongly informed by the experience of working with young children. The book provides educators, childhood scholars, and parents alike with suggestions for dealing with (migration-related) social differentiation.

This book is also freely available online as an open-access digital edition, published with the support of the Swiss National Science Foundation.

Author: Ursina Jaeger
ISBN-10: 1978836996
ISBN-13: 9781978836990
Publisher: Rutgers University Press
Language: English
Published: 11/15/2024
Pages: 206
Format: Hardcover