Conference Agenda

In the global pursuit of educational equity, disparities rooted in family background remain a persistent challenge for children’s early learning and development. This issue is particularly acute in underdeveloped rural ethnic minority regions of Western China, where structural disadvantages in family resources translate into early developmental gaps before children enter compulsory schooling. In response to recent national policy initiatives—such as China’s Preschool Education Law (2025) and the Quality Assessment Guidelines (2022), which emphasize narrowing developmental disparities through improvements in process quality—there is an urgent need to understand how home and preschool environments jointly shape children’s outcomes.

This concern resonates strongly with European and international policy agendas. Across Europe, early childhood education and care (ECEC) has been positioned as a key lever for promoting social inclusion and equity, as reflected in the OECD’s Starting Strong reports and the European Commission’s Quality Framework for ECEC. Likewise, the United Nations Sustainable Development Goal 4.2 calls for ensuring access to quality early childhood development and pre-primary education for all children. These frameworks converge on the idea that high-quality institutional environments can mitigate inequalities rooted in family socioeconomic and cultural conditions.

Against this backdrop, the present study investigates the mechanisms between the family ecosystem and the kindergarten classroom language environment in predicting children’s early literacy and numeracy capabilities in ethnic minority rural contexts. While international evidence, including the OECD’s PISA framework and the ESCS index, has highlighted the role of family capital in shaping educational outcomes, less is known about how preschool process quality—particularly language-rich classroom environments—may compensate for or amplify these inequalities in culturally diverse settings.

Guided by an integrated theoretical framework, this research draws on Bronfenbrenner’s Ecological Systems Theory, conceptualizing children’s development as the product of interactions between nested microsystems, with the family and kindergarten as two primary settings. Within this ecological structure, Coleman’s Social Capital Theory is employed to model the pathway through which maternal education (as human capital) influences children’s early development via parent–child literacy interactions (as activated social capital). Furthermore, Bourdieu’s Cultural Capital Theory provides a critical lens to examine how family-based cultural resources are translated into developmental advantages, and how classroom environments may function as an external “field” that reshapes these processes.

Accordingly, the study addresses three core research questions:

1. Does parent–child literacy interaction mediate the relationship between maternal education and children’s early developmental outcomes?

2. To what extent does the quality of the classroom language environment independently predict children’s early literacy and numeracy skills?

3. Does the classroom language environment moderate the influence of family capital, operating as a compensatory mechanism or an enhancement mechanism?

Methodologically, the study adopts a multilevel design that accounts for the nested structure of children within preschool classrooms. Hierarchical Linear Modeling (HLM) will estimate both individual-level family effects and classroom-level contextual effects. Cross-level interaction models will test whether high-quality classroom language environments buffer disadvantaged home backgrounds or further empower children from resource-rich families.

By focusing on ethnic minority rural preschools, this research contributes a cross-cultural case to international debates on inclusive ECEC, process quality, and the “nurturing care” framework promoted by UNICEF and the WHO. It demonstrates how institutional environments may serve as mechanisms of equity in marginalized communities, offering insights relevant for broader European discussions on reducing early inequalities through high-quality preschool provision. Overall, this proposal advances understanding of how home–school ecosystem interactions shape early developmental trajectories, and how ECEC quality can function as a lever for social justice and educational inclusion.

The planned contribution pursues the question of whether and to what extent socio-spatial interpretation and perception by actors in educational practice gain significance in interaction with their clientele. The starting point is empirical analyses, which are based on a praxeological approach grounded in praxeological sociology of knowledge (Bohnsack, 2017, 2020). The analyses show that the view of children as clients of educational institutions is closely linked to perceptions and ideas about the local context—the social space—and also structures orientations toward one's own educational responsibility.
The working thesis assumes that educational institutions and actors generally (must) develop an implicit idea of the socio-spatial context through their clientele (e.g., the student body), which then guides their actions. The case presented in the article refers to a rural educational landscape in the east of the Federal Republic of Germany. This case shows that transformation requirements and demands on educational work that are often framed as crises – for example, in connection with migration or changing learning environments – are discussed in relation to the clientele, giving rise to diffuse divisions of responsibility between actors in primary education (elementary school, after-school care, leisure activities, and parents). From a European perspective, this has an integrating character, as the question of rurality and education is discussed internationally as a question of design (cf. Roberts/Fuqua, 2021). Against this background, the question arises as to which socio-spatial interpretations and perceptions gain significance in educational practice with the clientele and how this gives rise to divisions of responsibility within an educational landscape.
The focus of this article is on educational cooperation in explicitly rural educational landscapes. Rural space is not an objectively given characteristic, but is understood as a social construct accompanied by different discourses, perceptions, and attributions (Faulde, 2021; Helbrecht, 2021; Kramer & Jahnke, 2019). In addition to the term “rural,” the term “peripheral” is also used to describe a remote or isolated location that requires increased time, financial, or organizational effort to overcome (Miggelbrink, 2020).
Rural areas are fragmented structures that can be described as an educational archipelago, whose individual components must be linked together individually and in which spatial and institutional distances must be bridged (Castillo Ulloa et al., 2023). Rural areas thus appear to be characterized by a fragile dual structure: on the one hand, there are structural deficiencies, and on the other, diffuse systems of responsibility are emerging that make it difficult to participate in education.
From an educational perspective, educational landscapes are understood as concepts consisting of a multitude of spatially located, regional, or local educational and learning opportunities (Bollweg & Otto, 2011). The aim is to network school and extracurricular educational locations in order to support educational processes holistically, open up access, and facilitate transitions. A rural case study of an educational landscape consisting of a school, after-school care, and family- and leisure-related contexts is presented (2). On this basis, exemplary reconstructions are related to research on educational inequality and the potential of the praxeological approach is briefly discussed (3). Subsequently, the perspectives of the participating institutions are triangulated in order to identify how the shared clientele is perceived and what potential and barriers for the design of a rural educational landscape result from this (4). Finally, a contrasting example from an urban social space is included (5). The article thus ties in with the conference theme by defining knowing as the implicit knowledge about clients and social space that circulates in the institutions, and acting as the practical implementation of this knowledge in the assignment and delegation of educational responsibility.