Reframing assessment: Reconceptualising relationships and acknowledging emotional labour

Abstract

Implementing relationships-based pedagogies in infant and toddler settings might assume that teachers’ experiences of emotional labour will be acknowledged. This assumption may be complicated by assessment practices that both rely on and detract from relationship-building opportunities with infants and toddlers. Assessment also relies on reciprocal relationships between teachers, and between teachers and families. Drawing on sociocultural theoretical perspectives, this article illustrates how one team of infant-toddler teachers in Aotearoa-New Zealand reframed their assessment understandings and practices to acknowledge their experiences of emotional labour with infants and toddlers. Consequently, positive changes in the teachers’ relationships with children, with families and with each other eventuated. The author argues that reconceptualising relationships in infant-toddler settings requires an understanding of assessment as a reflexive, relational process that can occur during everyday interactions, and emotional labour as central to relationship-building. Implications include teachers’ need for time, reflective dialogue and support to address tensions between assessment and relational pedagogy, so that relationships might be reconceptualised and the importance of emotional labour acknowledged.

Introduction

Both relationships-based pedagogies and infants’ and toddlers’ learning and development are enhanced when early childhood settings enable effective relationships to be created (Edwards and Raikes, 2002; Shin, 2010). Building relationships varies considerably based on the nature of interactions, level of reciprocity and commitment each individual offers the developing relationship (Degotardi and Pearson, 2014). Building relationships with young children also involves essential emotion work (Andrew, 2015; Elfer, 2012; Page and Elfer, 2013). Emotion work is conceptualised in this article as emotional labour (Hochschild, 1983) to highlight emotion as a fundamental, yet contested, aspect of relationship-building with infants and toddlers. The term ‘teachers’ is used to refer to the adults at the centre of this article, who were in an educative role with children aged up to three years, and includes terms used internationally, such as ‘educators’ and ‘practitioners’.

Pedagogy involves considerations for learning, development, teaching and assessment, alongside interpreting and acting on policy discourses and professional edicts. This process involves negotiating competing messages about effective practices with infants and toddlers (Osgood, 2010). Assessment is one area which may raise tensions if teachers’ approach to assessment has little alignment with their approach to relationships-based pedagogies. For example, assessment that occurs as a separate process from teaching and learning risks detracting from, rather than relying on, relationship-building experiences. Assessment might be better understood as a reflexive, dynamic process situated within teacher–child, teacher–family and teacher–teacher interactions. In this way, a more analytical view of assessment as a relational phenomenon can be adopted, and the experiences of emotional labour required for effective relationship-building acknowledged.

This article draws from a wider Teaching and Learning Research Initiative in Aotearoa-New Zealand (hereafter New Zealand). The project involved teachers and academic researchers (one being the author) exploring the nature and assessment of children’s learning (Hedges and Cooper, 2014). The sociocultural context of the study is first introduced, followed by critical discussion of relationships-based pedagogies and emotional labour to highlight the tensions inherent in infant-toddler teachers’ work. The study’s methodology is then presented, and relevant themes analysed and discussed. These ideas support the argument that reconceptualising relationships with infants and toddlers requires assessment to be understood as a reflexive, relational process. It also involves acknowledging emotional labour as central to relationship-building.

Sociocultural assessment in early childhood education in New Zealand

Assessment is a core pedagogical practice that supports teaching and learning, and is undertaken by teachers in all sectors internationally. It is a complex phenomenon, conceptualised and understood in different ways, and serves a number of purposes. The New Zealand national early childhood curriculum, Te Whāriki (Ministry of Education, 1996, 2017), promotes sociocultural approaches to pedagogy and assessment, challenging traditional views of learning as predetermined and decontextualised in favour of complex views of learning as dynamic and situated. Te Whāriki (Ministry of Education, 1996: 29) – the version which underpinned teachers’ practices at the time of the study – defines assessment as a ‘minute by minute’ process ‘as adults listen, watch, and interact’ with children to support learning. Assessment in this context is therefore a dynamic, interactive process that can occur during relationship-building with children.

Documentation is acknowledged internationally as one of several interrelated components of assessment, alongside observation, meaning-making, reflection and dialogue (Dahlberg et al., 1999). New Zealand early childhood teachers have freedom to develop their own forms of assessment documentation (Carr et al., 2016). Many teachers choose instead to take up models promoted by externally funded resources, such as the Ministry of Education (2004, 2007, 2009) assessment exemplars Kei tua o te pae (Education Review Office, 2008). The models promoted include narrative documentation – namely, learning stories – underpinned by a sociocultural focus on participation and relationships (Carr, 2001), and portfolios to house these and other documentation about children.

Learning stories have since become taken-for-granted assessment formats in many services in New Zealand (Carr et al., 2016; Zhang, 2016), including for the teachers in the study, and have also been taken up internationally (e.g. Karlsdóttir and Garðarsdóttir, 2010; Williamson et al., 2006). A reliance on narrative documentation has, however, attracted critique (e.g. Blaiklock, 2008; Zhang, 2016). Zhang (2016) argued that learning stories alone are insufficient in addressing the multiple purposes of assessment, and that teachers need knowledge about alternative assessment tools and methods to align with the sociocultural notions of diversity, inclusion and social justice.

A preference for narrative documentation is consistent with a focus on pedagogical documentation in Reggio Emilia (Dahlberg et al., 1999). This approach, like the learning-stories approach, promotes assessment as a meaning-making process that occurs in storied ways with children and families, where the purpose is ‘to explore connections, experience and meaning-making rather than generate evidence or proof’ (White, 2011: 48). Effective use of this approach requires teachers to understand the purposes of narrative documentation.

Narrative documentation informed by meaning-making has two main purposes. First, it provides a way of recording meaning made of children’s learning, from the perspectives of children, teachers and families (Dahlberg et al., 1999). Second, it acts as a mediating tool by informing dialogue regarding this meaning-making process. Together, these purposes support a broad view of assessment as a reflexive, relational process, reliant on teachers’ interactions with children, families and other teachers, and situated in the ‘dialogic encounters between teachers and children’ (White, 2011: 48). These ideas about assessment may be pertinent to teachers who engage in the sensitive process of relationship-building with young children.

Relationships-based pedagogies with infants and toddlers

Relationships play a pivotal role in how children fare in early childhood, and reflect a common foundation for pedagogical practices with infants and toddlers. Early childhood environments afford rich opportunities for children to explore relationships of varying levels, intensities, forms and functions (Degotardi and Pearson, 2014). This affordance does not, however, guarantee that relationship-building and associated processes will be prioritised in practice, nor that a shared understanding of relationships-based pedagogies will exist.

Relationships-based pedagogy, or relational pedagogy, is grounded in a commitment to develop, strengthen and sustain teacher–child, teacher–family and teacher–teacher relationships (Degotardi and Pearson, 2014). Pedagogical decisions seek to promote, rather than undermine, relationships, and invite children to be in ‘close, rhythmic relationships with caring people’ (Edwards and Raikes, 2002: 14). Interactions and dialogue sit at the heart of relational pedagogy, where relationships take shape as ‘a reflective and negotiative process that requires reciprocity, invitation and the sustaining of joint involvement episodes’ (Papatheodorou, 2009: 5). This sociocultural view of pedagogy assumes that infants and toddlers will be understood as competent learning partners who seek connections with others to address their own goals and intentions (White and Mika, 2013). It also assumes that learning occurs through interactions and dialogue during a process of meaning-making and thinking, leaving room for uncertainty (White and Mika, 2013) and, thus, what cannot be known about the other.

The existence of multiple approaches to relational pedagogy reflects the nuances of individuals, groups, settings and cultures, and diverse understandings (Degotardi and Pearson, 2014). For example, many Māori whānau (the wider family – a concept of the indigenous people of New Zealand) share responsibility for all infants and toddlers (White and Mika, 2013) – an approach which may be mirrored in an educational setting. In other settings, one to two teachers might embrace the main responsibility for a few children from the larger group, for continuity of care. This key-teacher (or primary-caregiver) system positions the teacher as an important emotional base, assisting the development of warm, responsive relationships with each child and his/her family (Elliot, 2007). While teachers in New Zealand can determine their own approach, it is important to note that relationships-based pedagogies are more complex than basic provision of care as task-based (Davis and Degotardi, 2015; Degotardi and Pearson, 2014) and, consistent with Dahlberg et al. (1999), promote the teacher’s role as complementary to, not a substitute for, the family.

Relationship-building, a core aspect of relational pedagogy, is a sensitive, skilful and emotional process that can enhance teachers’ understandings of children (Elliot, 2007; Shin, 2010). Positive teacher–child relationships develop through warm, caring and attuned interactions, sensitive responses to each child’s emotional states, and being emotionally available to children (Degotardi and Pearson, 2014; Elliot, 2007). The more developed these relationships are, the more likely it is that teachers and children are able to ‘read’ the emotions and intentions of one another for mutual understanding (Degotardi, 2015; Hargreaves, 2000: 815). Yet, pedagogical practices that take time away from relationship-building can limit opportunities to learn infants’ subtle cues, expressions and intentions (Shin, 2010). The potential for significant misinterpretation requires teachers to reflect on how well relationship-building processes are attended to in practice. Teachers may also feel challenged by having to attend with sensitivity to multiple infants and their families, and, as such, need support for this important emotional work.

Emotional labour as a core aspect of relationship-building

Emotions are an irrefutable part of teachers’ subjective and affective experiences with children (Osgood, 2010), and therefore central to relationship-building. According to Degotardi and Pearson (2014: 119), relationships with infants and toddlers can evoke strong emotional expressions, so teachers need to be ‘accepting of, and able to work with, strong feelings and the expressions of emotions’. Yet, despite the vital role of emotions, and the potential for teachers to experience more emotional intensity in their work the younger the child (Hargreaves, 2000), emotions may remain unarticulated and unacknowledged.

Teachers’ emotion work can be conceptualised as ‘emotional labour’. First coined by the American sociologist Arlie Russell Hochschild (1983), emotional labour is the ability to suppress feelings in order to evoke positive feelings in those being cared for. It involves three elements: personal contact with others; evoking particular emotional states in others; and one’s own emotional state being influenced by the workplace and/or employer. In the context of infant and toddler pedagogy, emotional labour might describe how teachers strive to maintain a happy emotional state in the children they care for, despite how teachers feel internally about their role. Keeping children happy is their priority, but it may also be an expectation of their job. These ideas suggest that emotional labour can be both productive and problematic.

Teachers therefore need to recognise when emotional labour is also unproductive. While many teachers willingly invest emotionally in their relationships with young children (Osgood, 2010), teachers’ well-being can be negatively affected, resulting in workplace stress, low morale and a high staff turnover (Andrew, 2015). For example, the emotional demands may be so great that they take a toll on teachers and lead to a detached approach to caregiving – an intentional decision to step back from children to cope with the demands of their role.

Unproductive emotional labour can also negatively affect relationships with children. For example, negative emotions can lead teachers to ‘shut off’ and withhold their emotional input and communication, negatively influencing their connections with children and families (Degotardi and Pearson, 2014: 119). Being attentive to teachers’ experiences of emotional labour is therefore essential, particularly to ensure that they can support the emotional experiences and learning of infants and toddlers (Elfer, 2012). Attention might also be given to teachers’ workload and potential tensions that may negatively affect the quality of their relational pedagogy.

Overall, then, the literature suggests that sociocultural assessment practices can both rely on and detract from relationship-building opportunities with children, that relationship-building is an important sensitive and emotional aspect of relationships-based pedagogies, and that emotional labour is important but can be unproductive and affect teachers’ and children’s well-being. The teachers in this study faced similar issues, and struggled to balance assessment practices alongside their relational pedagogy. This article therefore addresses the following questions: What is the nature of teachers’ emotional labour and assessment within relational pedagogy, and what are the consequences of addressing any tension between them?

Methodology

The early childhood centre referred to in this article was licensed for 50 children, including 10 children aged under two years. The infant-toddler room included up to 15 infants and toddlers, and four teachers, reflecting a higher-than-required ratio. The participants included three teachers from the same team (who have been given the pseudonyms Rosa, Mia and Chanel), who had all been employed in the centre for less than a year, and two centre leaders – Beryl (employed for over three years) and Lena (employed for one year) – who were familiar with the children and supportive of teachers’ relational pedagogy.

The wider Teaching and Learning Research Initiative study this article developed from was an interpretivist, qualitative case study (Merriam, 2009), involving a partnership between academic and teacher researchers. This article examines findings about assessment practices that arose as a follow-up to the project in the above-mentioned centre. The infant-toddler teaching team sought the researchers’ support to help resolve tensions regarding their practices. In order to ensure that the team owned the process, the author facilitated reflective dialogue (Grey, 2015) based on offering and discussing, rather than imposing, relevant ideas about assessment. This was to enable the team to decide on the changes they wanted to make with the author’s support, consistent with the partnership model framing the wider study.

This follow-up to the wider study involved informal group discussions with teaching staff of the infant-toddler room to explore views regarding their assessment and documentation of infants’ and toddlers’ learning, before and after a change was made. It also involved understanding the challenges the team faced in relation to those responsibilities. Each group discussion was audio-recorded to allow accurate recall for analysis. The data included four transcripts of informal discussions with members of the team for a total of 2.75 hours, and analysis of six daily diaries and six portfolios that housed learning stories alongside other samples of children’s work. Utilising Braun and Clarke’s (2006) framework for thematic analysis, the data was categorised and coded as two overarching themes: emotional labour as a source of both satisfaction and frustration, and reframing assessment for transformation of practice. The aim of the analysis was to access rich insights about teachers’ assessment practices and emotional labour within a relational pedagogy, any tensions that arose, and the consequences for relationships and emotional labour after addressing those tensions.

The teachers’ original assessment practices included a daily diary – a small A5-sized book that included descriptive details about each child’s day. A brief extract from a child’s (aged 12 months) daily diary illustrates the nature of this descriptive text: ‘[The child] loves being outside and today he was exploring the sandpit independently and the water trough with bubbles. He just loves being outside and had such a good day today :-)’. Each teacher was responsible for three to four children’s diaries, and wrote one learning story about individual children every two to three weeks. The teachers expressed difficulty in writing more often due to minimal non-contact time. All of the teachers had two hours of non-contact time per week, used primarily for ‘Assessment … learning stories’ (Beryl). The learning stories and children’s artwork were housed in individual children’s portfolios. The teachers reported that families read their child’s diary regularly, had access to the portfolios and were satisfied with the level of information these provided. In contrast to the descriptive text of the diaries, the learning stories reflected analytical narratives of the children’s learning (e.g. relationship-building, interests and inquiries) accompanied by annotated photographs. A brief excerpt from a child’s (aged 10 months) learning story illustrates the teachers’ ability to identify and document learning:

You spent about ten minutes today exploring the paint till you communicated to me that you had finished exploring. It was great being able to repeat this sensory experience with you today. It is through tactile experiences like this that you are able to begin to make sense of the world we live in.

During team-initiated dialogue, the teachers signalled a desire to change current assessment practices, given their struggle to maintain their approach to assessment. The author suggested the idea of revising their original daily diary to become a main tool of documented assessment – albeit with important changes – given that its focus was already on children, and teachers and families were already engaging with it on a daily basis. The team decided to trial this idea. Further discussions focused on suggested changes. The teachers would handwrite or print short analytical narratives about children’s significant experiences to emphasise learning and development. The children’s ideas and images of the children in action would be included, where possible, alongside provocations and questions to encourage teacher reflection. The idea of learning stories would thus be maintained, albeit converged with the diary format.

The teachers chose to retain the term ‘diary’ as continuity for those who regularly engaged with it. The aim was to use the diary more as an accessible tool to capture analytical narratives regarding children, and the contents to inform dialogue with children and families. Discussions also focused on how Te Whāriki’s sociocultural notion of assessment would underpin their new approach. Enhancing the rigour of the diary in these ways would enable teachers to respond to children with more nuanced understandings, and reposition assessment within the context of everyday interactions while allowing more time to attend to their emotional labour during relationship-building.

Findings

Two significant findings were identified in the data. First, before the change in assessment practices, teachers had experienced emotional labour as a source of both satisfaction and exhaustion. Second, reframing assessment through reflective dialogue led to transformation of practice.

Emotional labour as a source of both satisfaction and exhaustion

The team’s key-teacher system involved supporting the care routines of and relationship-building with three to four children. They valued continuity of care, which was apparent when leaders rather than relievers stepped in to take on a teacher’s role when needed, allowing the ratio to be maintained and minimal disruption for the children. The teachers also supported children emotionally when they transitioned from home, or from the infant group to the older children’s group. Overall, the team’s positive attitude towards their caring role was reflected in Beryl’s words: ‘For us, the care of the children is more important than anything else’. In these ways, the teachers’ emotional and relational work with the children was embraced and viewed as a source of satisfaction.

The teachers’ relational pedagogy was also, however, intense at times. For example, Beryl reported that teachers provide ‘constant care’ for young children, who ‘require so much more care’ than older children: ‘Teachers need to have a break from that constant care … another two hours of non-contact a week, that would go a long way to giving us time to breathe and to think’. The teachers were therefore committed to caring for the infants and toddlers. Beryl’s earlier reference to children being their priority and the team’s emphasis on continuity of care suggested that ‘constant care’ referred to their sensitive process of relationship-building with children. However, Beryl’s reference to teachers’ need for downtime ‘to breathe and to think’ alluded to their emotional labour and intense relational pedagogy.

The team also experienced disruption to their relational pedagogy, resulting in exhaustion. For example, Beryl described their ‘challenging year’ as involving five new staff joining the team, which suggested a period of high staff turnover and a shared focus on improving the quality of care with children: ‘apart from having … five new team members, we have focussed a lot more on children’s care and providing best practice … it’s been exhausting for teachers’. Beryl therefore revealed that the teachers were expected to manage significant change while building relationships with children. The teachers’ focus on improving care practices signalled a dissatisfaction with current practices, and an openness to change. Managing staff changes alongside a focus on improvement eventually led to teacher exhaustion. This dire outcome, coupled with a high staff turnover, signalled unproductive emotional labour as a consequence of their current situation.

The teachers struggled to maintain their documentation when new children started, which impacted on the teachers’ relational pedagogy by intensifying their emotional work. For example, when talking about assessment, Beryl suggested that the teachers felt challenged by losing time for documentation when supporting transitioning children: ‘pressure [from having] new children … new ones that have come in that need that time and attention. … [Teachers] just haven’t had the time to write’. Here, Beryl alluded to a view of assessment as documentation and, although unarticulated, indirectly referred to emotional labour with her reference to the pressure felt during transition. The belief that extra time and attention were needed suggested that assessment and relationship-building were perceived as separate activities.

During one period of high staff turnover, noted earlier as a consequence of unrecognised emotional labour, Mia and Rosa were assigned key-teacher responsibility for all the children and their daily diaries. Rosa stated: ‘We’ve had a lot of staff changes in this room, which means Mia and I are the primary for all the kids, so we have to balance the books between … us, which is quite hard’. Here, the increase in relationship-building and documentation responsibilities for both Mia and Rosa left them struggling to maintain documentation. The intensified workload forced them to strategise how ‘to balance the books’ and let go of documentation in order to prioritise relationship-building.

Both leaders agreed that documentation had low priority when time was needed for relationship-building. Beryl noted that the teachers were ‘being the best they can be for the children … there’s no time to think about anything different. These things sit around the edges’. Here, she reiterated the shared value of relationships and care, but also a view of assessment as positioned outside relationships with children. It was through discussing these emotional intensities with the researchers that the teaching team decided to make some changes to how they understood and approached assessment.

Transformation of practice

After the change in approach to assessment, there was a shared feeling of manageability and assessment becoming a part of everyday processes. The teachers talked about engaging with the diaries more often than they had done with learning stories and portfolios. They were surprised that they could maintain this form of assessment during the day without needing to leave the room. Mia said ‘it’s manageable, we’re doing it!’, adding: ‘We definitely haven’t needed as much time off the floor to work on the learning stories because we’re doing this during the day when we are present, and we utilise that time a little bit for other things’. Rosa agreed that it was manageable, but mostly on ‘quiet days’, implying that when there were fewer children, experiences of emotional labour felt less intense.

Clearly, the pressure felt earlier to maintain multiple forms of documentation outside interactions had eased, allowing the teachers to choose how to use their non-contact time. Of significance, the teachers were starting to see how assessment could be integrated with their relational work, while enhancing understandings of children at the same time. Rosa clarified this by expressing that documenting more of what they were noticing meant ‘thinking about it every day more on an intellectual level rather than waiting weekly to do stories’. A brief excerpt from a revised daily diary entry illustrates one teacher’s attempt to make sense of a toddler’s non-verbal expressions in relation to his potential interest:

Today we learnt about [the child’s] new interest in buses and he proved this by pointing to the buses passing down Queen Street, saying ‘Bus’. Inside, he liked listening to the storybook and song ‘The Wheels on the Bus’.

The revised diary led to enhanced communication and relationships between the teachers. Rosa explained: ‘We … talk through … what has happened with the experience we have written down’. Beryl enthusiastically added: ‘they’re often talking to each other while they are writing them’. Therefore, documenting assessment when together, as opposed to ‘off the floor’ (Mia), afforded the teachers more opportunities to engage in dialogue about their shared work and relate to each other than their previous approach had allowed.

The teachers’ enhanced emphasis on learning and development also improved their interactions with children. For example, Beryl had observed the teachers ‘having more conversations with children because the play has changed’, which was likely due to the teachers responding to the children with nuanced understandings. Beryl believed that the diaries were ‘helping [the teachers] to look into what these children are learning’.

The enriched teacher–child relationships echoed reports of the diaries enhancing relationships between teachers and families. Beryl believed that the diaries had ‘enabled the relationships … the conversation and the trust a lot more too’, revealing a transforming effect on teacher–family relationships. Beryl shared one parent’s feedback (who was also a teacher with the older children): ‘She was just so overwhelmed by what she saw. She said, “I’m here all day and I didn’t see any of that”’. Overall, then, it was apparent that reframing assessment had led to enhanced relationships with others in a variety of ways.

Discussion

The findings highlighted the teachers’ previous conceptualisation of assessment as mostly documentation, somewhat unrelated to relationship-building, and occurring outside the teaching and learning process. Reframing assessment practices then led to a more manageable, analytical and relational approach, enabling assessment to enter the relational spaces of the teachers’ everyday interactions. In turn, teacher–teacher, teacher–child and teacher–family relationships were transformed in positive ways, and the potential to acknowledge and attend to experiences of emotional labour during relationship-building was enhanced.

The team’s original approach to assessment as mostly documentation sat at odds with a view of assessment from a sociocultural perspective. A sociocultural approach, which underpins Te Whāriki’s approach to assessment as a dynamic, interactive process, assumes that learning occurs through dialogue, participation and relationships (Carr, 2001; Ministry of Education, 1996, 2017). The team’s previous approach of descriptive text and learning stories written in isolation conflicted with an approach underpinned by sociocultural perspectives. There was also little evidence found of how reflection, dialogue and multiple perspectives informed assessment, in order to reflect a broader understanding. Together, these ideas suggest the possibility that assessment was undertaken as a way to generate ‘text-as-evidence’ (White, 2011: 48), where teachers document according to what they think they should. The concern for losing time to write and a desire for more non-contact time reflected such an approach, and suggests that assessment was perceived as a form of accountability.

Viewing assessment as accountability is problematic, as it can negatively affect teachers’ opportunities for relationship-building with children. White (2011: 48) argued that teachers who perceive they have to produce narrative-based assessment documentation to fulfil an evidence-based ideology, a task which can consume a lot of time, can compromise the ability to know children in depth and think beyond the ‘professional’ purposes of assessment. Although the teachers in the current study prioritised relationship-building, their original approach to assessment could be interpreted as compliance to models promoted by official organisations, such as the Ministry of Education’s Kei tua o te pae. However, compliance can also infer a sense of moral accountability, where one acts with integrity and respect for the work of others, while enhancing relationships (Grey, 2015). Even so, adopting models requires time, support and reflective dialogue to ensure relevance for a particular context. The teachers likely found themselves adopting formats without the appropriate time and support, hindering their integration of assessment and relational pedagogy.

Reframing assessment involved converging the teachers’ assessment tools into one main artefact while retaining what was important from each. While assessment documentation is expected in New Zealand early childhood education, teachers can choose how it is developed and takes shape (Carr et al., 2016). The reframing encouraged the teachers to loosen compliance to dominant models and negotiate an approach that suited their purposes, while ensuring relationships remained at the forefront. This situation endorses White’s (2011) call for teachers to shift away from a compliance lens and, instead, move towards a dialogic stance of assessment that encourages sense-making and being open to complexity. The teachers’ willingness to change signalled a move towards this dialogic stance and a more analytical and relational approach to assessment.

Previous research endorses the idea of converging assessment tools. In Australia, for example, Williamson et al. (2006) explored the possibility of early childhood teachers and special education specialists using a single narrative assessment tool for all children. By converging two models of assessment – one skills-based and the other strengths-based – the specialists in particular broadened their lens for assessment, focused more on strengths, not deficits, and embraced a holistic view of each child. In the current study, converging multiple forms of assessment documentation required the teachers to reflect on learning, teaching, assessment and understandings about children (Carr et al., 2016). Connecting assessment to teaching and learning allows teachers to experience assessment as something more dialogic and relational, although more time and support may help in consolidating developing understandings.

The apparent consequences for the teachers’ relationships with children, families and each other illuminated the multifaceted and dynamic nature of relationships (Degotardi and Pearson, 2014). Changing assessment practices reconceptualised the quality and nature of their relationships, which took on new ‘interactions, patterns and expectations’ in response to changes in the environment (Degotardi and Pearson, 2014: 32). For example, relationships between the teachers, teachers and children, and teachers and families became more dialogic as new opportunities for reciprocal conversations, based on more nuanced understandings of children and their intentions, trust and ongoing sharing of insights, became possible. The reframing also positioned assessment in the relational and dialogic spaces of everyday practice, allowing for a more integrated approach to assessment and relational pedagogy, rather than them being viewed as two separate processes.

Reframing assessment in these ways also enhanced the team’s potential to acknowledge and attend to their experiences of emotional labour as central to their relational work with children. The teachers’ unwavering willingness to invest in warm and close relationships with children, despite the challenges they faced, was consistent with earlier research focusing on emotional and relational pedagogy with infants and toddlers (Degotardi and Pearson, 2014; Elfer, 2012; Elliot, 2007; Osgood, 2010; Page and Elfer, 2013). Emotional labour was, for the teachers, a source of both satisfaction and exhaustion, reiterating the idea that emotional labour can be both productive and problematic. Indeed, emotional complexities are central to, and therefore an expected component of, relationship-building with infants and toddlers (Elfer, 2012; Page and Elfer, 2013). However, while the teachers in the current study embraced the emotional labour of relationship-building as a ‘vital and credible’ aspect of their practice (Osgood, 2010: 130), they did not articulate it as such and, thus, may have accepted it uncritically as a taken-for-granted aspect of their role.

This lack of articulation, alongside the potential for emotional labour to intensify in particular conditions, exposed the emotional labour of relationship-building as an overlooked area of practice. Osgood (2010) challenged the under-recognised nature of emotion in infant-toddler pedagogy, while others have called for emotional labour to be acknowledged, openly discussed and managed ethically in order to avoid it leading to emotional stress (Elfer, 2012), detached caregiving and exploitation by others. These ideas are supported in Degotardi and Pearson’s (2014: 120) statement that if ‘issues of the heart are important features of relationships, the emotional aspect of infant-toddler practice needs to be acknowledged and addressed if educators are to approach emotionally demanding situations with an open and accepting mind’. The current study has shown that reframing assessment towards a sociocultural approach can enhance relational pedagogy in several ways. It can reposition relationships as central to assessment practices and enhance the nature of relationships with teachers, children and families. It can also create a situation where teachers’ emotional labour is not only acknowledged as central to relationship-building with infants and toddlers, but can also be attended to as part of the complexities of everyday practice.

Limitations

Several limitations are apparent. Case-study methodology limits the ability to generalise findings to other settings, although readers are encouraged to interpret the findings for their own situations. Further, the data is based on teachers’ self-reports of practice, which may or may not align with actual practice. Observations of teaching practice would have clarified these self-reports and allowed for enhanced corroboration of the findings. Additional research time may have enabled the author to determine the teachers’ developing understandings of assessment and relational pedagogy over time.

Conclusion

This article has argued that promoting a relationships-based pedagogy with infants and toddlers requires a view of assessment as a reflexive, relational process that can occur during everyday interactions, and an understanding of emotional labour as central to relationship-building. When assessment and relational pedagogy are approached as integrated processes, relationships with children, families and one another can be enhanced and strengthened, and experiences of emotional labour prioritised as central to relationship-building. Teachers, however, need support, with time to discuss, reflect on and address tensions of practice. Broad access to supportive forums would assist teaching teams to consider ways to integrate relational pedagogy and analytical approaches to assessment. It might also support teachers to articulate the notion of emotional labour as it relates to their practice with infants and toddlers. Further, challenging policies at the centre and policy levels regarding low contact hours may help to acknowledge emotional labour and reduce burnout, while ensuring stability for children, families and staff.