Religiøse spiseforskrifter i barnehagen. En kvalitativ undersøkelse om barnehagers strategier for tilpasning i møte med islamske spiseforskrifter

The purpose of this study is to examine what strategies ECEC centres choose to meet requirements from parents regarding religious eating regulations.

The analysis of the interviews points at two main strategies chosen by ECEC centres when adapting meals to religious eating regulations: either to serve food that everyone can eat, or to serve different food, where Muslim children can eat one of the options.

The ECEC centres choosing to serve the same food for all children substantiate their strategy as a wish not to expose certain children as being different. Conversely, the argument of serving different food for children is based on the idea that children need to learn to relate to diversity. However, the authors of the study conclude that the reasons are primarily characterised by a pragmatic position on the question about adapting meals to religious eating regulations. This means that the educational reasons for choosing specific strategies come from considerations of a more practical nature such as availability of halal meat or financial and logistic aspects. On this basis, the authors assess that the reasons are influenced by a lack of educational terminology.

The empirical material consists of seven semi-structured qualitative interviews with ECEC centre leaders (styrere and pedagogiske ledere) in municipal and private ECEC centres (barnehager). At the interviews, the authors asked about food and meal situations at the ECEC centres in general. Moreover, they asked the informants to account for and substantiate the individual ECEC centre's strategies for adapting meals to religious eating regulations. The article focuses on adapting meals to Muslim eating regulations. The interview analysis was inspired by Malterud, Kvale and Brinkmann's methods for meaning categorisation of qualitative data.

Andreassen, B., & Øvrebø, E. M. (2017). Religiøse spiseforskrifter i barnehagen. En kvalitativ undersøkelse om barnehagers strategier for tilpasning i møte med islamske spiseforskrifter. Tidsskrift for Nordisk Barnehageforskning, 16(1), 1-15.