Exploring the care in early childhood education and care

Abstract

The place of care in early childhood education and care (ECEC) is a wicked problem. It is a problem that, I argue, needs to be explored, investigated and 'spoken of'. The aim of this Special Issue is to speak of care and the specificity and multiplicity of care in early years knowledges, relationships and practices. Care is difficult to define. Like play, care can be assumed as an inherently good part of ECEC, and in a heavily feminised work environment, it is easily assumed to be simply part of what an early childhood educator naturally does. However, I suggest that it is dangerous to assume that we understand a concept as complex and value laden as care without also engaging in reflection and analysis about the singularity, complexity and the multiplicity of care in ECEC environments. Others have also made the suggestion that care should be articulated more carefully. Dahlberg and Moss (2005), for example, have pointed out that in the context of ECEC, care is rarely developed and discussed in any great depth or with any sense of robustness. The word 'care' sits within the language of the early years associated with providing a safe place for children to be supervised and have their needs attended to, an association that raises problematic nostalgia about home and family life where care, mothering and maternalism are idealised (Ailwood, 2007). As Connell (2013) notes, all education requires care. Whether we are teaching 2-year-olds or adult research students, our work and professional identities as teachers are folded through with care (Acker, 1995). In ECEC, we have built a robust language for talking of the educational and pedagogical work that we do. However, as Mol (2008) suggests in the field of medicine, 'the ideal of good care is silently incorporated in practices and does not speak for itself … The aim is to articulate the specificities of good care so that we may talk about it' (p. 2). Education, like medicine, is a social and human endeavour, and as such care underpins educational relationships, just as it does medical relationships. Care is entwined in our work as teachers, and most explicitly in the early years. The papers presented in this Special Issue argue that we should not delegitimise or leave this aspect of our work unspoken; instead, we can engage in reasserting and naming the place of care in our work. Care: ethics and politics An enduring and widely cited definition of care was developed by Tronto and Fisher in the early 1990s and is self-cited here by Tronto (2010):

Who cares for carers? How discursive constructions of care work marginalized early childhood educators in Ontario’s 2018 provincial election

“…In addition, we view early childhood educators as carers who are engaged in complex and simultaneous caring and educational practices. As Ailwood (2017: 305) states: ‘it is dangerous to assume that we understand a concept as complex and value laden as care without also engaging in reflection and analysis about the singularity, complexity and the multiplicity of care in ECEC environments’.…”

Ontario Early Childhood Educators’ understandings of care, carework and care practices in ECEC Program

“…With a number of provincial elections behind us, a federal election on the horizon, conservative governments in four of the thirteen provinces and territories amounting to an uncertain policy environment, it is imperative that the value of care, carework and the value of the ECEC workforce is better understood. Researchers suggest it is time to stop making care secondary to and not as important as education and reassert its worth in practice and policy (Ailwood, 2017;Langford, Richardson, Albanese, Bezanson, Prentice, & White, 2017). If care continues to be treated as inferior to education there will most certainly be negative impacts on the ECEC sector in Canada.…”

Mapping Child-Animal Care Relations in Shaun Tan’s Tales from Outer Suburbia

“…As I understand it, care matters from relational perspectives (Koggel, 1998), that is, "entangled" understandings of care that resist tendencies toward "feminization" (Ailwood, 2017, p. 306), as well as paternalism, "in which care givers assume that they know better than care receivers what those care receivers need, and parochialism, in which care givers develop preferences for care receivers who are closer to them" (Tronto, 2010, p. 161). Correspondingly, understandings of care taken up in this article follow from Joanne Ailwood's (2017) theorizations of entangled caring exchanges, comprising models beyond that of the "traditional" dyadic (of mother-child relations, for example), which typically occurs within family settings. Ailwood outlines feminist care ethics such as those put forward by Joan Tronto (2010) that recognize "the physical needs of human and nonhuman bodies, the environment and the ways in which our worlds need to be maintained so that we may continue living within them" (Ailwood, 2017, p. 306).…”