Caring about care: Reasserting care as integral to early childhood education and care practice, politics and policies in Canada

Abstract

Care and education have deep historical divisions in the Canadian policy landscape: care is traditionally situated as a private, gendered, and a welfare problem, whereas education is seen as a universal public good. Since the early 2000s, the entrenched divide between private care and public education has been challenged by academic, applied and political settings mainly through human capital investment arguments. This perspective allocates scarce public funds to early childhood education and care through a lens narrowly focused on child development outcomes. From the investment perspective, care remains a prerequisite to education rather than a public good in its own right. This chapter seeks to disrupt this neoliberal, human capital discourse that has justified and continues to position care as subordinate to education. Drawing upon the feminist ethics of care scholarship of philosopher Virginia Held, political scientist Joan Tronto, and sociologist Marian Barnes, this chapter reconceptualizes the care in early childhood education and care rooted through four key ideas: (1) Care is a universal and fundamental aspect of all human life. In early childhood settings, young children's dependency on care is negatively regarded as

Dangerous time: a critical qualitative inquiry into early childhood educators' perspectives on planning time in southern Ontario

“…This research contributes to the scholarship about the wages and working conditions of ECEs and the stress that they experience, highlighting the importance of having paid planning time. It also contributes to reconceptualist literature that examines early childhood education and the role of the educator from poststructural and feminist perspectives (Bloch, Swadener & Cannella, 2018;Cannella, 1997Cannella, , 2018Dahlberg, Moss & Pence, 2006;Langford, 2007Langford, , 2010Langford, Richardson, Albanese, Bezanson, Prentice & White, 2017;MacNaughton, 2003MacNaughton, , 2005Moss, 2006Moss, , 2010Moss, , 2019Osgood, 2006;Pacini-Ketchabaw, Nxumalo, Kocher, Elliot & Sanchez, 2015).…”

“…Osgood (2006) aptly refers to this increase in regulations as the regulatory gaze and argues that the intensification of educators' workloads shifts their focus toward meeting the expectations for professionalism and quality leaving them too busy to think about anything else (p. 6). Osgood (2006) critiques the masculinized nature of neoliberalism within in the discourse of professionalism and shows how early childhood educators, who are predominately women, are subjected to regulations meant to ensure high standards of quality but which are incommensurable with an ethics of care (Langford, Richardson, Albanese, Bezanson, Prentice & White, 2017;Osgood, 2006). Neoliberalism values individuality and the entrepreneur and relies on disciplinary technologies (Foucault, 1979) to regulate individual performance within the system, while the feminine characteristics of care work cannot be easily measured or regulated and therefore have "little exchange value" in the market (Tronto, 2013;Osgood, 2006, p. 9).…”

Experiences working split shifts: a phenomenological study of early childhood educators

“…Furthermore, the findings from my social inquiry will be linked to the notion that action must occur (Mertens, 2009). Given the highly politicized nature of early childhood education and care (Langford et al, 2017), policy level action is needed to address challenges that result from the lived experiences of RECEs working split shifts. Using critical theory under this transformative worldview, the notion of empowering RECEs to recognize the constraints placed upon them based on their gender, their socioeconomic status, their ethnicity, and/or their culture will be both important and evident.…”

“…In Canada, there is a tendency to hold early learning and care at greater value when it is perceived to be focused on school readiness (Langford, Richardson, Albanese, Bezanson, Prentice, and White, 2017). As such, instead of appreciating where children presently are, value is placed on where they will be-on what they will 'become' (Langford et al, 2017).…”

“…Many RECEs have the capacity and training to implement early childhood pedagogies (Kashin, 2007), yet what they are allowed to contribute to public education is very limited. In light of this, if education is considered a "universal public good" (Langford et. al, 2017), then where does early learning and care fit?…”