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This contribution aims to explore the relationship between the intercultural skills of educators working in early childhood institutions and ethical awareness, drawing on insights from an empirical research project. Ethical awareness is the core category identified in the ongoing research "Reflecting Together: an Ethical-Social Education Curriculum in Early Childhood Schooling", from which the proposed reflections have emerged.

Initially, the focus is on describing a context that provides meaningful experiences for young children in their early years (Piccioli, 2021) from an intercultural perspective (Fiorucci, Pinto Minerva, Portera, 2017; Pescarmona, 2021). The study also delves into the intercultural skills of educators (Fiorucci, 2020) and subsequently explores the potential role played by teachers' ethical awareness in this context. Ethical awareness is examined regarding education professionals working with children aged 0 to 6 and in relation to the educational intervention itself, aiming to promote this competence from early childhood.

The paper presents the initial results of research that focuses on the relationship between education and ethics, reflective thinking, discussions on values, and meaningful educational practices. The research adopts an ethically oriented methodological framework (Bianchi, 2019): Constructivist Grounded Theory (Charmaz, 2014), and its main characteristics are explored. The sample chosen for semi-structured interviews includes pedagogues, kindergarten teachers, and university professors working in Italy.

The analysis of data from over thirty interviews led to the identification of several categories, with their properties thoroughly investigated. One of these categories, proven to be pivotal, is ethical awareness. Specifically, the characteristic that gives rise to this contribution is its intertwining with the intercultural skills of teachers working in early childhood services. Using as a reference the intercultural competence model proposed by Fiorucci (2020) and Deardorff (2006), ethical awareness emerges as a cross-cutting element within the complex and articulated framework of competences required for educators working in early childhood services. This is crucial for them to work effectively and contribute to building a quality education (Moss, 2013).

In conclusion, the paper proposes a reflection on the possibility of including intercultural ethical awareness as an educational objective in Bachelor's programs in Educational Sciences and Primary Education Sciences. It suggests the construct of a community of thought (Michelini, 2016) as a horizon of meaning in the context of these academic pathways.

For many children born and growing up in contexts of social marginalization and poverty is a "condemnation" to a destiny marked by lost opportunities and foreclosed. ECEC is an important safeguard in the early fight against educational poverty and social injustice, preventing the risks of marginality. Educational work carried out in an integrated manner by services 06 can reduce forms of disadvantage, ensuring real opportunities for development for all.
The contribution presents a research-training path carried out with teachers who work in the nursery schools of the south-west area of Brescia, marked by many challenges, including new forms of poverty, discrimination, marginalization, to name just a few. These are highly multicultural schools, with classes in which the presence of children with a migrant background is close to 90% and in which serious situations of social marginalization occur. In this schools, teachers interface daily with the issue of educational poverty in terms not only of lack of opportunities, deprivation and quality of life, but also as social deprivation.
In consideration of the situation we intended to explore the reasons behind an integrated vision of educational action and create the conditions so that educators feel encouraged to work in a systemic way. It is impossible to contrast the different aspects of educational poverty, without considering its existential characteristics and implications on the professional identity and emotional experiences of teachers.
Educational staff play a strategic role, although they must act within a marked complexity, which is usually managed in emergency, without having the possibility of generating professional reflexivity and awareness. This perspective opens up questions about the identification of training approaches and research methods: what kind of research approach should be adopted to support an integrated education for children aged zero to six? How to bring out the professional resources of educators who daily put their educational skills at the service of children with a migrant background, disadvantaged, or in educational poverty?
We will present the results of this path, conducted with the MAG method (méthode d’analyse en groupe, ie. method of analysis in a group), which has opened up spaces for reflection and discussion on challenges, critical issues, efforts of a patient and delicate work of interconnection with families, social services, the different educational realities. The complexity of educational poverty and marginality, with its multifaceted aspects and challenges, cannot be understood and solved solely using didactic and scholastic approaches. To address these challenges, it is important to promote new In-service training processes, more integrated and capable of improving complex strategies to face intricate, interconnected and changing phenomenon of social injustice, according to the inspiring principles of the integrated system 06.
Through this research and training experience, we want to offer an opportunity to make the 06 services places open to the community, in its broadest and most inclusive sense. The complexity of educational poverty requires multidisciplinary measures and engagement of several actors to improve education and social justice, enhancing community.

The presence of families with migratory background in Italy is by now an increasingly stable and concrete reality, which has structurally transformed educational institutions in a multicultural sense. For this reason, it was necessary to scholars, politicians and educational professionals to make a profound reflection on the categories of identity, culture and coexistence, experimenting with innovative educational practices in contexts in which people from different cultural universes coexist, but do not necessarily meet. In this perspective, intercultural education is the best approach to promote dialogue and foster the development of an open mind starting from the early childhood education. “Doing” an intercultural education with very young children means creating a path in which everyone learns to recognize themselves as unique in their own subjectivity and originality. Every child and every family can learn to build positive relation and connection with others, open to the exchange of points of view and aware that change is indispensable for evolution. At the same time, intercultural education implies a commitment to the construction of a real condition of equity, through a recognition of equal rights for all to have access from early childhood onwards to quality educational and training paths.

In this regard, the aim of this paper is to present the three case studies in early childhood services in Rome, Italy, which presents itself as an interesting and complex research laboratory about intercultural practices. The objective, in addition to the valorization of the peculiar elements of the proposed initiatives, is to grasp the still unexplored spaces on which it appears to be fundamental to activate research paths that know how to combine qualitative and quantitative in-depth studies.

The scientific literature on early childhood education today points out that, in educational services for children 0 to 6 years old, an intercultural perspective is necessary in order to welcome children and families from different cultural, social, linguistic, family and religious backgrounds. Institutional documents also pinpoint this concept (Ministry of Education, 2021, 2022). However, the intercultural perspective is also indispensable beyond this historical necessity to understand the complexity of childhood representations interwoven even in seemingly uniform linguistic, ethnic and religious contexts, and the implicit and unreflective way in which they influence the educator's training and professionalism. The unveiling and the analysis of social representations of childhood and educational work with children thus become crucial in childhood educators' training processes to make them increasingly aware of their own basic assumptions and their possible transformation.

The cultural nature of educational practices is a dominant theme in the international debate on quality and access to early childhood education and care (Lazzari, 2016), and is increasingly widespread in Italy (Favaro, Mantovani, Musatti, 2006; Bove, Mantovani, 2015; Bove, 2020).

Italian early childhood educational services welcome many children and adults with different origins, histories and languages. However, while the multicultural dimension is a matter of fact, the intercultural dimension is an educational achievement that requires the ability to transform a group composed of different children into an opportunity for mutual knowledge, encounter, and exchange (Ministry of Education, 2021, p. 13). Constructing intercultural educational approaches and practices in services and preschools, therefore, represents a crucial challenge, which requires planning and intentionality on the part of the entire educational team of each service.

This aim necessarily requires a specific effort in the training and professional qualification of childcare workers, which are central elements in the cultural debate and policies on child education.

Indeed, the quality of the professionalism of childcare educators is in close connection with the quality of the services themselves (OECD, 2019) and depends both on the quality of initial and in-service training (OECD, 2020) and on supportive working conditions that create opportunities for continuous professional development (Lazzari, 2016).

Analysing the results of a qualitative study aimed at exploring the university choice of first-year students in the Science of Education/Childhood course at the University of Parma, this paper presents data collected through a questionnaire and some focus groups on the social representations and experiences of students on childhood and educational work with children. It explores, in particular, whether and how the cultural and intercultural diversity theme is conceptualised and understood concerning children's education. The results of the research denote a very stereotyped image of childhood and culture and a low awareness of their own (and powerful) representations of childhood: this result suggests the need for an initial education in which - through integrated didactic paths, internships and initial, entry and exit orientation - the intercultural dimension can be experienced and understood starting from formative opportunities of a reflective type on one's own values and moral habits and on one's own and others' social and cultural affiliations.