Time for slow care: Bringing slow pedagogy into conversation with ethics of care in the infant/toddler classroom

Abstract

This research presents the findings of an 8-month ethnographic case study of one infant/toddler classroom in the southeastern United States. Participants included the classroom’s two (white, female) teachers and a racially diverse group of 12 children between one to 2 years of age. Grounded within an ethics of care theoretical framework, this research was guided by the following research questions: (1) What are teachers’ lived experiences of care in this early childhood classroom community? and (2) How do those teachers understand their lived experiences of care? During data revisiting with teachers (Tobin and Hsueh, 2014), the concept of time—and particularly, slowness—emerged as a central connecting theme. The emergence of this central theme led to an overarching theoretically guided analysis of the data, implementing a feminist interpretation of Clark’s (2022) articulation of Slow Pedagogy in ECE to understand how slowness—a feminized quality antithetical to the furious pace of neoliberal education—is central to care in this context. In addition, a thematic analysis (Saldaña, 2021) of ethnographic data, including field notes, video, and photos gathered during participant observations, and four semi-structured teacher interviews, produced two foundational themes in teachers’ understandings and practices of care: Care as Emotional Presence, and Care as Acknowledgment. Findings introduce the concept of Slow Care, a noveltheorizing of care practices that emphasizes the importance of slow, relationally-guided temporalities, serving to contest and counter the growing neoliberal pressures of efficiency and productivity in early childhood policy and practice.