Care -full pedagogy: Conceptualizing feminist care ethics as an overarching critical framework to interrupt the dominance of developmentalism within post-secondary early childhood education programs

Abstract

This article offers a theoretical provocation through conceptualizing a pedagogy of care as a means of caring with students and each other to interrupt the dominance of developmentalism in Canadian post-secondary early childhood education programs. The authors’ conceptualization of care-full as pedagogy is rooted in the premises that education is always ethical and political, and caring about, for and with others is necessary to establish equitable, democratic spaces at the post-secondary level. In contrast to the developmental framework embraced in many Canadian post-secondary early childhood education programs, the authors describe how a critical, care-full overarching pedagogical framework provides room for educators and students to deeply and meaningfully explore developmentalism and other theoretical frameworks. They argue that a pedagogy of care rooted in feminist care ethics and Freire's critical theory can contribute to establishing a safe learning climate where developmentalism can be critiqued and alternative ways to think about children's development can be contested, explored and debated. As the authors are conceptualizing it, a care-full pedagogical framework intentionally supports the intellectual, ethical and political risk-taking necessary for critique and alternative thinking. They follow this provocation through by imagining what a care-full pedagogy might look and feel like in a post-secondary early childhood education course on child development.

Introduction

Developmentalism is anchored in the idea that a child's early experiences determine the parameters of what is possible in each compartmentalized ‘domain’ (i.e. physical, cognitive, social, emotional and moral), age and stage for the rest of the child's life (O’Loughlin, 2018). Developmentalism has become particularly pronounced in neo-liberal states, which centre the unencumbered market, individualism and entrepreneurship to the occlusion of collectively caring about, for and with others (Eizadirad and Abawi, 2021). Discourses of developmentalism circulate together with a human capital discourse – a line of reasoning that suggests societies/states/economies must maximize the developmental potential of each child to maximize future market productivity. These combined discourses frame children's development and childhood as universalized, thereby potentially pathologizing and marginalizing children, families and educators who do not fit inside that framework (Moss, 2019).

The intersection of developmental and human capital discourses contributes to their dominance in Canadian post-secondary early childhood education (ECE) programs. In addition, crossing over the US border, developmentally appropriate practice as a practice expression of developmentalism has been highly influential in the Canadian ECE field (Bloch, 2018). As college and university educators who have taught ECE students for many years, we are troubled by this dominance because it limits opportunities for students to engage with different perspectives on children's development and experiences. We will argue that a care-full pedagogy grounded in feminist care ethics (FCE) is one (not necessary the) overarching path to opening up a safe learning climate for students to critically explore alternative ways of thinking about children, families and their role as educators.

We work with FCE for several reasons. First, FCE speaks to the priority of care in ECE, where care is often fractured from and marginalized in relation to education. Second, while we are familiar with other ethical frameworks, such as Levinas’s ethics of an encounter (discussed extensively in Dahlberg and Moss, 2005), we find the feminist orientation of FCE critical for understanding why and how care work is assigned in many societies to women and racialized groups. Third, we follow Robinson’s (2019: 14) thinking that care as a critical ethical and political theory locates contextual sensitivity and therefore ‘difference at the very core’ of care relations. This means that FCE values differences in perspective-taking but contests social hierarchies and binaries produced by valuing some differences over others. In addition, FCE attends to how differences intersect and are imbued with, or distanced from, power and privilege.

In thinking about what care is, we draw on Fisher and Tronto (1990) s often referenced conceptualization:

On the most general level, we suggest that caring be viewed as a species activity that includes everything that we do to maintain, continue, and repair our ‘world’ so that we can live in it as well as possible. That world includes our bodies, our selves, and our environment, all of which we seek to interweave in a complex, life-sustaining web.(p.40)

For Tronto (2013: 34), this conceptualization of care is both political and ethical: ‘ethically a feminist ethics of care begins from a sensitivity to the traditional boundary drawn between politics and ethics’. In other words, how care is valued in a political community is often an indication of what ethical qualities are valued in that community. Tronto (2013), quoting Sevenhuijsen (1998), envisions a caring democracy as a political community underpinned by commitments to the values of plurality, communication, trust and respect.

We argue that a care-full pedagogy rooted in FCE is necessary to establish a more equitable, democratic and transformative space where faculty and students make ethical decisions to ‘live in it as well as possible’ through difference, dialogue, critique and contestation. Consistent with our understanding of other critical theories (i.e. Freirean pedagogy, anti-racist education and posthumanism), we suggest that a care-full pedagogy is foundational to engaging in the difficult, destabilizing, relational and emotional process of disrupting the status quo. This disruption also requires ongoing critiques of FCE as a theory driven by white women, including ourselves. Contemporary FCE scholars have been, and continue to be, actively addressing and engaging with these critiques by exploring how difference and context are at the core of ethical decision-making and actions (Robinson, 2019).

From our perspective, a care-full pedagogy is particularly important for teaching ECE students, who, as predominantly women and increasingly racialized women (in Canada), are not valued and respected for the important caring work they do. We maintain that ECE students need to be cared about and for in order for them to be open to creating an equitable, democratic and transformative learning space.

We begin this article with an overview of the key ideas from FCE that we think are useful for conceptualizing a pedagogy of care. We then turn to Freire (2007) to explore components of an anti-oppressive pedagogical framework and how pedagogy rooted in FCE embodies a critical pedagogical process. We acknowledge the contemporary social and economic context of post-secondary educational environments and the discursive and material conditions in which Canadian early childhood educators work. Within this context, we imagine what a care-full pedagogy might look and/or feel like for post-secondary educators and students broadly, and then more specifically within ECE post-secondary programs that seek to introduce students to a broad range of perspectives, paradigms and world views. In this discussion, we synthesize key ideas from existing literature on FCE in post-secondary learning environments with our knowledge and experiences in post-secondary ECE programs. We end with a provocation of how students and faculty in a first-year ECE course on child development might experience a care-full pedagogical approach.

Feminist care ethics

FCE is often tied to Carol Gilligan, a developmental psychologist who was a student of Lawrence Kohlberg in the 1980s. Kohlberg established stages of moral development focused on the acquisition of universal principles for moral decision-making. Through an innovative research method (Hekman, 2014), Gilligan (1982) found that girls’ tendency to emphasize context and challenge universal rules was not an indication of less developed moral reasoning (as Kohlberg suggested), but a qualitatively different, valuable and important way of thinking and being. It was not that girls did not understand how to apply universal rules to various moral dilemmas, but that the girls in her study were more likely to understand, speak and act in a ‘different voice’. Gilligan observed that girls were apt to critically engage with the ‘rules’ to consider a multitude of contextual factors, particularly consequences for interpersonal relationships. In prioritizing the maintenance/flourishing of relationships in moral decision-making, Gilligan fundamentally challenged traditional, rational, objectivist masculine thinking and opened up possibilities for other moral knowledges (e.g. embodied experiences such as emotions). Thus, Gilligan, along with other childhood scholars (i.e. Burman, 1994), began to question developmentalism's emphasis on universality. More specifically, Gilligan problematized Kohlberg's theories of moral development, given that his research participants were primarily boys and the findings were then generalized to all children.

While Indigenous knowledges have long recognized the importance of relationality and interdependence in moral decision-making in human and more-than-human worlds, Gilligan's work opened the western intellectual space to valuing a way of thinking and being that ongoing colonization suppressed and attempted to erase. As we move through this article and expand on our understanding of FCE in relation to ECE pedagogy, we also remain cognizant of the intersection of FCE with other critical theories, including, but not limited to, Indigenous knowledges. As Whyte and Cuomo (2017: 234) point out, ‘[a]ttentive caring for the intertwined needs of humans and nonhumans within interdependent communities’ is a key element of Indigenous knowledges on which FCE hinges".

Although there are points of divergence between first-, second- and third-generation feminist care ethicists working in diverse academic disciplines (e.g. Nel Noddings, Virginia Held, Eva Kittay, Joan Tronto, Fiona Robinson, Daniel Engster, Maurice Hamington, Sophie Bourgault and Sarah Munawar), the fundamental priorities of FCE are consistent: the primacy of relationality, context, equity, openness and collaboration. Tronto’s (2013) conceptual work around the non-linear phases of caring (and their corresponding moral elements) is particularly helpful for conceptualizing and enacting education as a democratic process or ‘caring democracy’. These phases are: (1) caring about (attentiveness or noticing need); (2) caring for (taking responsibility for care); (3) caregiving (the physical, emotional and social acts of providing care); (4) care-receiving (completion of care through the active response from the care-receiver); and (5) caring with (trust and solidarity in a political space). While the first four phases of care focus primarily on the interpersonal aspects of caregiving and care-receiving between individuals within networks of care, caring with brings the focus to the social and political level. Raivio et al. (2022) similarly developed a model for understanding, researching and planning socially sustainable communities of care in ECE at multiple levels, from an international level of care to interpersonal events and acts of care.

Along with Tronto (1993), many care scholars have extended FCE to political theory (e.g. Engester and Hamington, 2015; Robinson, 2011; Tronto, 2013, 2015). The key elements of caring with – trust and solidarity – speak to the importance of sharing power and listening – particularly to those whose voices, needs or experiences are excluded from decision-making processes. To care with is to be open to other ways of thinking, being and knowing, and then act in ways that reflect these new knowledges. As FCE scholars insist, there is no way to engage in this process without understanding the process as political: to stand idly by and not be open to new knowledges and ways of being is to perpetuate what already is.

Another of Tronto’s (1993, 2013) key concepts that we are thinking with is ‘privileged irresponsibility’. This phenomenon occurs when individuals, groups or nation states do not acknowledge or even see the undervalued/taken-for-granted care work on which they depend. Gender, race, class, disability, global location and other social factors intersect in such a way that marginalized groups are tasked with the messy, time-intensive and difficult work of caregiving. For those in positions of privilege (and benefiting from the status quo), the groups doing the caregiving do not typically have a voice at the political level. Countering privileged irresponsibility requires that we not only acknowledge but also act in discursive and material ways to disrupt the exploitation of those overly responsible for and/or doing care work. This idea was summed up in an anecdotal comment made to one of the authors by an early childhood educator who had recently immigrated to Canada. She said: ‘If post-secondary ECE educators are not engaging in advocacy they are taking advantage of their students’ (Richardson et al., 2022).

In the post-secondary context, a care-full pedagogy recognizes the problems of privileged irresponsibility: one is required to engage in the process of becoming aware of and acting with others at various levels to address the consequences and harms of privileged irresponsibility. Educators, who are in a position of power and privilege in relation to those they teach, are responsible for noticing students’ needs and responding to them with curiosity, humility and openness. In institutional contexts, which too often demand certainty, caring with insists that educators give up the veil of certainty and dive into the mud – the difficult, messy, uncomfortable and embodied ethical, political, social and emotional process that care is.

The merging of feminist care ethics with critical pedagogy

Working in the 1970s in the context of an oppressive military government, Freire saw anti-oppressive education as the key mechanism of resisting and transforming the hegemonic sociopolitical order. He wrote about such concepts as conscientization (awakening to how one's experiences are rooted in broader social, political and economic structures), humanization (the process of becoming more fully human), dialogue (engaging in open, honest, authentic conversation with trusted others to work towards transformation) and praxis (the merging of ideas with political action) (Freire, 2007). These concepts overlap with FCE: both emphasize the genuine sharing of power, taking responsibility for and with others, coming to understand other ways of being and knowing in open conversation with trusted others, and translating ideas and thinking into political and ethical action.

At times, Freire and Tronto (writing decades apart and in different disciplines) use similar language. Freire (2007: 54) states that ‘pedagogy projects should be carried out with the oppressed in the process of organizing’. Both also see education as generative, ‘an act of creation’ or transformation (Freire, 2007: 89), rather than a paternalistic act of meeting need or transmitting ‘banking’ knowledge. Echoing several themes of FCE, Freire (2007: 60) writes that ‘those who authentically commit themselves to the people must re-examine themselves constantly’. A critical and care-full pedagogy thus embraces the idea that students and educators are always in motion, becoming through wilfully escaping the ‘circles of certainty’ that trap all of us in the status quo (Freire, 2007: 38). Freire's thinking about ‘humanization’ – the process of becoming more fully human through ensuring that all people are understood as people who know and can act – reflects the emphasis of FCE on care-receivers as active participants in the care process (Tronto's (2013) fourth phase – the completion of care). The theme of relationality, becoming, trust and solidarity, and active listening, coupled with reflective, thoughtful responses, all playing out in the broader ethical and political context, where we are knowers and actors, is consistent across FCE and critical pedagogy.

Contemporary educational theorist and teacher Tony Monchinski (2010: 1) makes the convincing argument that all critical pedagogy is fundamentally rooted in FCE: ‘the ethical mooring of critical pedagogies is an ethic of care’. While Freire never mentions women, he does place a great deal of emphasis on the relationship between students and teachers and democratic authority (sharing power) in the ‘ultimate goal for greater humanization’ (Monchinski, 2010: 102). Like FCE and other feminist theories, Freire challenges binary thinking (i.e. oppressed/oppressor), creating space to engage with the conceptual dualisms that feminism has long problematized (Hekman, 2014). Monchinski (2010) notes that bell hooks credited Freire with remaining open to feminist critiques of his work. Freire admitted: ‘I have learned much from feminism and have come to define my work as feminist’ (quoted in Monchinski, 2010: 105).

Amidst the many affinities, first-generation FCE theorist Nel Noddings (an educational philosopher) points to some important differences between FCE and critical pedagogy as conceptualized by Freire. Noddings (2013: 89) notes that the ultimate purpose of dialogue in Freire's work is political transformation, while for FCE it is to ‘initiate or maintain caring relations and to understand what the Other is feeling and thinking’. In this way, Noddings understands FCE to centre relational processes over political action, although she recognizes that both are important and inextricably connected. Noddings offers another, more subtle, critique of Freire's conceptualization of critical thinking. Freire writes that critical thinking is ‘thinking that does not separate itself from action but constantly immerses itself in temporality without fear of the risks involved’ (Freire, 2007 quoted in Noddings, 2013: 90). While Noddings (2013: 90) does not question the necessity of the praxis of knowledge and action, she asserts that it is not ‘without fear’ but ‘despite fear’. This is an important distinction as it speaks to the unsettling, embodied and deeply relational experience of engaging in political resistance. In noting this difference, Noddings acknowledges that engaging in authentic dialogue in relations with others is not comfortable and often carries material and emotional risks, from being ostracized from dominant social groups and/or economic structures to political exile (as Freire experienced first-hand). Finally, Noddings asserts that a ‘banking’ model of education is not inherently harmful. While recognizing that an exclusive reliance on such a model of education will unquestionably work against Freire's overall goals of conscientization, humanization and transformation, she feels that there is a place for students to ‘bank’ knowledge and/or skills. To draw on an example in the post-secondary ECE environment, it is very difficult for students and educators to critique developmentalism without an understanding of key developmental theories. In this way, the information might need to be deposited to be transformed.

The Canadian post-secondary educational context

Like almost all aspects of contemporary social, economic and political life, post-secondary educational institutions have been deeply impacted by neo-liberalism and a shift towards the marketization of public services (Moss, 2019). For students and educators alike, ‘succeeding’ in the increasingly marketized and transactional post-secondary learning environment has immediate concrete and material implications for their daily lives. Educators – particularly part-time and/or tenure-track professors – face significant pressure to produce ‘hard’ outcomes that will advance their career: peer-reviewed journal articles, research grants and books (preferably monographs). For undergraduate students in degree ECE programs, there is an understandable ongoing preoccupation with grades as recorded in official transcripts, as these dictate the possibility of further, more specialized study (usually entry to a teachers’ college where they benefit from greater financial security). Rather than taking risks and challenging existing ways of thinking or being, it is more comfortable for students to reiterate material from lectures and produce high scores in evaluations.

Most Canadian two-year post-secondary ECE programs exist at the college level, although there is an increasing number of undergraduate and graduate degrees in Early Childhood Studies (or related fields). Graduates of both degree and diploma post-secondary programs rarely stay in the sector for long (if they practise in ECE at all), deciding to pursue further education in a related (typically teachers’ colleges, which qualifies them to work in the public school system) or unrelated field. It is even less likely that those with a graduate degree in Early Childhood Studies practise in early childhood settings with children on a daily basis. Few, if any, early childhood centres have the resources to recruit and retain staff with these qualifications on a permanent basis.

As noted earlier, Canadian college and undergraduate university programs related to ECE are deeply immersed in developmental theory. ECE students are expected to transmit and apply the knowledge of psychologists and paediatricians, who define the parameters of what it is important to know and do, as well as the ‘best’ path to get there (i.e. through developmentally appropriate practice). The way most Canadian ECE post-secondary programs are structured is through theory and field placement courses, whereby developmental theory tends to exclude other theoretical lenses, and placement courses are understood as an opportunity for students to apply (often through a pass or fail tick-box approach) what was learned in class.

Caring for the carers: the discursive and material gaps experienced by the early childhood education professional

Across highly marketized systems, early childhood educators are not cared about or for (Johnston, 2019). While early childhood educators are commonly referred to as ‘professionals’ across Canada, nowhere in the country do their wages and/or working conditions reflect a professional status. Even in Ontario, the only Canadian province where a college diploma is legally required to practise as an early childhood educator, decent work for early childhood educators remains a distant dream. Clearly, the shift to being considered a professional must extend far beyond the requirements of registration with a regulatory institution. The hope of the Ontario early childhood educator community was that the establishment of the College of Early Childhood Educators would lead to decent work, respect, prestige, and personal and professional autonomy for early childhood educators, who are highly gendered. However, 15 years on, early childhood educators in Ontario still experience poverty-level wages, little professional support and poor working conditions (Association of Early Childhood Educators of Ontario, 2017). Furthermore, the professional expectations of early childhood educators (ongoing professional development requirements and responsibility for the well-being of children and families) have grown exponentially.

The gap between the legal categorization of early childhood educators as professionals and their material realities became more visible throughout the COVID-19 pandemic, where, despite being ‘professionals’ in Ontario, they did not have widespread access to appropriate personal protection equipment, were not prioritized for vaccines (they received access a week before the general public) and were not given the wage top-ups for essential workers (Powell and Ferns, 2020a, 2020b). The plight of early childhood educators across Canada up to and throughout the pandemic was (and remains) similar, although no other province or territory legally situates early childhood educators as professionals.

The key point here is that Ontarian early childhood educators exist in a confusing professional space where they are increasingly expected to uphold professional standards of practice rooted in developmental knowledge yet continue to be overworked and underpaid. Their work is undeniably a matter of public interest and value; yet it is deeply entrenched in an increasingly private and commodified system where their remuneration is inextricably tied to (unaffordable) parent fees. In Canada, there is a great deal of discursive value placed on children and childhood in policy and the media, but there is woefully inadequate policy infrastructure to ensure that children have access to good care. Furthermore, it is often the case that students studying ECE are taught by professors who themselves have not been practising early childhood educators; this makes it difficult for some to grasp the material and political realities of early childhood educators’ lives. This is also the case with policymakers. Even as Canada rolls out its first ever national childcare and early learning system, there is remarkably little policy discussion about the recruitment, retention and overall well-being of the ECE professionals needed to staff the programs (McGinn, 2022).

Given this context for Canadian post-secondary educators and students, the questions become: How can the classroom be a place in which everyone is valued, respected and intellectually challenged? How can learning spaces be democratic spaces in which multiple perspectives, theories and world views are explored and debated? What if we talked about, rather than shied away from, the fact that early childhood educators are predominantly women and experience chronically poor wages and working conditions? From our experiences, post-secondary ECE programs are dominated by one theory – developmentalism – leaving no space to ask these critical questions. Our fundamental assertion here is that it is not only asking these critical questions that is important, but also thinking about how, and with whom, we ask these questions. We suggest that a care-full pedagogical approach in post-secondary ECE programs is one way of bridging the chronic gaps between pedagogical theory, policy, and the material and political realities of educators’, and children’s and families’, lives. Preliminary research in other fields – for example, youth with disabilities transitioning from primary to secondary school education (Lithari and Rogers, 2017) – inspires hope that a pedagogy rooted in FCE may be a promising path forwards.

What is a care-full pedagogical approach?

As we are conceptualizing it here, a care-full pedagogy is a way of engaging in the educational process that reflects the ethics and goals of critical pedagogy – including FCE. care-full pedagogy prioritizes responsive, meaningful and caring relations at the interpersonal, community and broader socio-political levels. It requires intentional engagement in thoughtful consideration and decision-making at each of the five stages of caring outlined by Tronto (2013). In embracing a care-full pedagogy, educators and students are required to engage in dialogue with others while seriously considering the ethical and political implications of their thinking and actions. care-full pedagogy requires both acknowledging our privileged irresponsibilities and being attentive to power relations at every level, while caring relationships always remain the priority. It lays the foundations for creating a classroom in which everyone is committed to living in the world ‘as well as possible’, to quote Fisher and Tronto (1990: 40 definition of care).

A care-full pedagogy is embodied at the individual level, instantiating discomfort, vulnerability, anger, hope and other emotions. As implied by Noddings (2013) in her ‘despite fear’ comment noted above, Zembylas et al. (2014) speak directly to the embodied and emotional nature of centring FCE in the education process. They draw on the example of privileged irresponsibility to illustrate this centring. In becoming aware of one's complacent role in privileged irresponsibility (i.e. not caring about/doing anything to address the working conditions for early childhood educators), anger, shame and guilt are likely to be experienced by those benefitting from the exploitative social, economic and political structures in place. To address this, Zembylas (2017: 8) introduces a ‘reconceptualized ethics of care through discomfort’, whereby both care and discomfort are required to challenge ‘dominant beliefs, social habits and normative practices that sustain social inequities and create openings for individual social transformation’. Building on this, a care-full pedagogy requires that the embodied experience of shame, guilt or anger (or whatever it is) has space to be expressed and subsequently taken seriously as a legitimate and important starting place for embracing new ideas. Educators and students alike remain open to being wrong, embrace uncertainty, act and think with humility, and accept whatever emotions arise through this process. In this way, learning is not only an intellectual or cognitive pursuit, but also an ongoing embodied and emotional process that occurs in relation to others. Where traditional and rationalist educational approaches attempt to clear the waters of decision-making from emotional sediment or mud, FCE embraces the mud, understanding it as defining the parameters of what is and what is possible at a particular time, space and place.

A recent anthology edited by Vivienne Bozalek, Michalinos Zembylas and Joan Tronto (2021) draws on FCE and feminist new materialism in theorizing higher education pedagogies. The introduction (and conclusion) of the anthology highlight the ‘urgency to rethink pedagogies in higher education in ways that speak to current global contexts and draw on cutting-edge ethico-onto-epistemological and political developments’ (Bozalek et al., 2021: 2). From this perspective, education is not only a process of teaching and learning what is already known and how we know it (epistemology), but also to think more broadly about what it is possible to know or not know (ontology). And these processes are both constituted by and constitute the ethical and political parameters of what is possible for all persons, beings and things. Tronto concludes:

[A pedagogical approach rooted in care ethics] demands that one be more observant and curious. It requires that the kinds of boundaries and division that allow academia to thrive be dissolved. It requires not only a patience to engage with the world more broadly, but the courage to face uncertain, imprecise, hidden and complex realities that are in flux and that are all implicated in contemporary practices of power, care and knowledge production and transmission. (Tronto, 2021: 159)

Hamington (2012) reflects on his care-full approach to teaching FCE in an upper-year undergraduate course cross-listed between philosophy, theatre and women's studies. Counter-intuitively for a Professor of Philosophy, Hamington centred students’ experiences of their bodies first through meditative exercises and then moved onto exploring FCE through dramatic improvisational activities. He is explicit that his process was extremely uncomfortable for him and the students alike, although it ended up being an important learning experience for all involved. Hamington (2012: 43) concludes that ‘a performative theory of care implies that ethics cannot remain a cognitive acceptance and application of abstract moral frameworks but requires attending to the creation and recreation of self and other in the ongoing iterations of caring actions’.

A care-full approach in post-secondary ECE programs therefore requires a radical departure from the safety of regurgitating and applying developmental theory alone. It requires a fundamental rethinking of what is and what can be, as well as what the overall purpose of ECE is. Students and educators in post-secondary ECE programs require experience and guidance in navigating these muddy waters. It is unanchoring (and sometimes terrifying) to question or let go of ‘truths’ that have guided one's personal and/or professional work, no matter how long one has been in the work – especially if these ‘truths’ have been used as a key path to legitimizing the work of early childhood educators. According to a care-full pedagogy, we are humans with some knowledge, but not all of it. And, as Tronto (2013) argues, caring people are motivated by their own and others’ discursive and material realities to do better and live better in this world. Tronto's concept of ‘privileged irresponsibility’ reminds us that people are part of the problem and part of the solution. Above all, they are relational beings who come to understand themselves, their value and their role in the world in relation to others.

A Care-full pedagogy thought experiment

To ground our largely theoretical discussion thus far, we offer a provocation of what a care-full pedagogy approach might look like in the first class of a child development course (often the first course ECE students take). The educator communicates that the purpose of the course is to introduce students to significantly different ways of thinking (and the paradigms behind them) about children's growth and development. This communicates that the educator cares about the lives of children and families, and the potential harms that theories applied in practice can engender (Tronto's (2013) first phase: caring about). Some of these theories will be critiqued (rather than criticized), which is understood by Butler (2000), drawing on Foucault, as ‘a practice in which we pose the questions of the limits of our most sure ways of knowing’. This critique will also explore the ways in which traditional assumptions about child development can reflect who has privileges and power in our society. There is a recognition that many students and educators in post-secondary ECE programs already hold these assumptions and exercise ‘passes’ to avoid caring about these assumptions (Tronto’s second phase: taking responsibility). Finally, and most importantly, the educator makes explicit how a pedagogy of care as a means of caring with students and each other will support critique, and the discomfort it can provoke (Tronto’s third phase: caregiving). The aim of the course is therefore to establish a caring, political and democratic learning community where different ideas about children's development can be respectfully and compassionately contested, explored and debated. At the same time, this commitment to a care-full pedagogy will work against the pernicious divide between care and education, and powerfully communicate the value of the students caring about and for children and families. Students will be regularly asked if they feel cared for, how their thinking about child development has changed, and how these changes have influenced or transformed their practices and/or political and ethical values (Tronto’s fourth phase: care-receiving). In turn, the care of students influences their own caring identities and future acts of care with children and families. Through all of these caring processes, students and the educator care with (the fifth phase), creating an ethical and political space in which trust and solidarity are prioritized and enacted.

As this thought experiment shows, a care-full pedagogy is a way of being in relation to oneself and others. It opens to critiquing all sorts of inequities that are very much part of the infrastructure of contemporary economies and societies, but not through a clear ‘how to’ guide. Everyone in this political and ethical community embarks on the journey of not only acknowledging but also grappling with the inevitable tensions and affinities within and between different ideas, theories or ways of knowing. This is uncomfortable relational and emotional high-stakes work. It requires vulnerability, creativity (imagining something different) and persistence, all the while knowing that there is no clear end point. It requires being familiar with many different knowledges, including developmentalism, and ways of knowing while recognizing that there are still other possibilities. It requires humility, and therefore anxiety, as it is uncomfortable to sit with the idea that we do not know, and sometimes cannot know, the way. All of this is in contrast to the banking, transactional model of education that Freire (2007) critiques, where the expectation is that students reiterate and apply what they are taught by an expert. A care-full pedagogy also goes back to Noddings’ (2013) assertion that the relational process of dialogue is central to a caring classroom. Similarly, a care-full pedagogy reframes how we think about ECE students and future educators – from a deficit perspective to a strengths-based approach. Finally, the voices of early childhood educators are asserted and valued. In this way, ECE students, who are predominantly young women, will be cared about and for in ‘a complex life-affirming web’ (Tronto, 2013: 40 ).

Conclusion

A care-full pedagogy grounded in FCE and critical theory offers the possibility for post-secondary ECE students to explore different sources of knowledge about children's development and lives. Care-full pedagogical experiences create the conditions whereby the dominance of developmental theory can be interrupted in a way that prioritizes the material, political and embodied subjectivities of ECE students. We have argued that a care-full pedagogy is important for ECE students, who are predominantly young women and prioritize caring well for others but are not necessarily cared about or for. We have argued that space is needed for alternative ways of knowing and being outside of a/the dominant developmental framework through a care-full pedagogy. Contrary to perceptions that care is soft and easy, a care-full pedagogy attends to the deeply ethical and political, messy and complex nature of asking ECE students to think critically and care-fully. We maintain that we have a privileged responsibility to collectively undertake this important and demanding work in Canadian post-secondary ECE programs.