Every day more people leave their home country, family and friends because of war and persecution. Of these many are children that will continue their childhood in Denmark and part of that childhood entails being a part of the Danish daycare system. It is on this background this study has been made and its purpose is to study how the pedagogues that work with the refugee children view the social inclusion of them, how those opinions are made and what the consequences of those opinions can be.
To answer those questions we have utilized the method of the focus group interview and single person interviews to gather empirical evidence. To analyze the gathered material we have used the both the theory of phenomenology and interactionism. With phenomenology we have a tool to map and illustrate the pedagogues' opinions about the inclusion of refugee children in the Danish daycare system while interactionism provides us with the possibility to go beyond those opinions and see how they are constructed through various acts of interactionism. Our analysis is divided into two parts: One focusing on mapping the pedagogues' opinions of their work with including the refugee children and the other focusing on the processes that creates those opinions and their possible consequences.
Our study concludes that a great amount of opinions are shared by all if not most of the pedagogues. Those opinions include that the pedagogues feel it is sometimes necessary to exclude the refugee children in the short run to be able to include them successfully in the long run. They also share the opinion that the long term goal is for the children to grow up and be an active part of society which according to them includes learning the Danish language and values. Besides these criteria of success the pedagogues also experience a lot of shared hindrances on their way to achieving these goals. The most prominent of those issues are language barriers, cultural differences, working together with the children's parents and a lack of education and funds.
Our study also showcases that these opinions are a result of interactions not just between the pedagogues themselves, but also between them and the refugee children, their parents and even institutional interactionism. All these interactions are processed by the individual pedagogue and in the end form the individual's opinion of the work with inclusion and the refugee children.
In the end our study also looks beyond the questions we tried to answer and ask questions and pose dilemmas about the subject that are worth looking further into. These include but are not limited to the pedagogues lack of knowledge about PTSD and trauma in general, them not working culturally sensitive and the general lack of education about refugee children.