Exploring the care in early childhood education and care

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):

On the most general level, we suggest that caring be viewed as a species of 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. The world includes our bodies, our selves, and our environment, all of which we seek to interweave in a complex, life-sustaining web. (p. 160)

Or as Mol et al. (2010) state,

… whether we like it or not, human beings need food and shelter, and so do the animals that live with them/us. Someone has to harvest or slaughter, someone has to milk, someone has to cook … washing is wise as well … while everyone also needs to look after herself. All in all, care is central to daily life.

These definitions of care broadly speak to the physical needs of human and non-human bodies, the environment and the ways in which our worlds need to be maintained so that we may continue living within them.

Recent philosophies of an ethic of care emerged with the work of Gilligan (1982) and Noddings (1984) writing in the 1980s to reinstate women in philosophical and psychological discourses through developing feminine/feminist views of care. In education, Noddings has been particularly influential. Noddings’ (2012) more recent work on care and education describes a care exchange as being an expression of need by the receiver/student that is responded to by the carer/educator and then acknowledged by the receiver/student. However, this caring relationship remains one that is between two people, the receiver and the carer.

Into the 1990s, the work of feminists such as Tronto (1993) and Sevenhuijsen (1998) built the case for moving away from Noddings’ ideal of care being modelled on that of the dyad of mother/child in a nuclear family and home. The care work done in formal or institutional settings, such as ECEC settings is not simply a reproduction or substitution of the care work done in homes. Tronto resists the idea that care should be ‘family-like’, suggesting instead that while this may have some foundation, that institutional care is not family care and has a particularity that should not be taken for granted. Tronto (1993) argues that care is relational and in non-family settings we must consider power, purpose and particularity. In other words, Tronto invites us to consider what is the purpose of the caring institution, what are the power relationships and what is the particularity of the institution and the relationships (where human relationships are understood to be diverse and plural and therefore particular to the specific context).

Sevenhuijsen (1998) makes her case for care to be understood as inherent in a socio-political context of democratic citizenship. Her work encourages us to think of caring institutions as microcosms of our wider socio-political contexts, suggesting that new vocabularies are necessary for understanding social engagement and relationships of care. As with Tronto (1993), Sevenhuijsen re-asserts the need to resist the feminisation of care, instead focusing on care as a fundamental to human interdependency.

With the more recent work of Mol (2008) and Puig de la Bellacasa (2017), an ongoing development of an ethic of care can be seen. These authors move into a posthuman theoretical space, exploring the idea of care as relational within the human and more-than-human areas of technoscience and naturecultures. Both Mol and Puig de la Bellacasa note the messiness of care. Puig de la Bellacasa (2017) points out that care is ‘… unthinkable as something abstracted from its situatedness’ (p. 7). For Mol (2008), in her ethnography of diabetes clinics, care is tension between logic, tinkering and choice – a constant and messy engagement in processes of trial and error. This process emerges in a web of the specificities of the professional knowledge of medical staff and combined with their knowledge of patient’s lives and experiences, in relationship with the ways patients engage with their disease, the treatments and the medical staff.

Across many of these writers exploring an ethic of care are common themes of care in relation to power, to messiness and specificity, and challenges to the connection with a feminine ideal of ‘good’ care. The perceived connection between care and ‘good’ is also contested, caring being discussed as ranging from positive to negative and as sometimes oppressive and stressful. Mol (2008), for example, asks us to ‘disentagle “care” from an all too immediate association with kindness, dedication and generosity’ (p. 5).

Furthermore, care illuminates relationships of power and privilege. For example, considering who undertakes routine care work, who can afford to pay another to do this work and the level of non and/or under payment for this work highlights the ways in which paid care work is devalued and often precarious, while also being gendered, classed and raced. Sevenhuijsen (1998) asserted that

People with power are more often in a position to receive or demand care than to provide it, and, conversely, people with less social power find themselves more often on the ‘underside’ of care; that is, in situations in which they provide care without much power over the conditions and the means, and often in positions of invisibility and voicelessness. (p. 24)

Engaging with the power and privilege of care also enable us to consider marginalisation of non-dominant conceptualisations of care. For example, dominant political conceptualisations of care in colonial governments across the world was one that was paternalistic, with a perception of Indigenous peoples as less-than-human. This created deep historical suspicions regarding the provision of both care and education on the part of Indigenous peoples. In Australia, in the name of care and education, Aboriginal children were removed from their families, country and cultures to be placed in institutions or with non-Aboriginal families. When the power, privilege and politics of care are opened up, it becomes more possible to be ethically reciprocal (Todd, 2016) in staying with this wicked ontological problem of care in ECEC.

A provocation to care in ECEC

The right care at the right moment requires a responsiveness and sensitivity that should be recognised as serious professional work. It requires networks of relationships with children caring about each other, about adults, about the world and adults doing the same. When ‘good’ relationships and pedagogical interactions occur, they are most likely to be based in caring relationships. Attention to the place of care in our work can be political, pushing back against the ‘neoliberal cascade’ (Connell, 2013) in education where care is diminished and the focus is upon individuals who are autonomous and rational citizen/workers rather than on education as an encounter between interconnected, fragile and complex humans. Finding ways to express the importance of care in all its complexity and specificity is vital in our current environment of ungenerous neoliberalism (Calder et al., 2016). This will entail exploring the significant levels of professional knowledge, decision-making and ongoing reflection required for the building and sustenance of caring relationships with colleagues, families and children.

When we engage with the neoliberal agenda we are offered up a double-edged sword. On one hand, to gain political and professional recognition, we must actively emphasise our educational credentials; often actively and strategically making use of economic cost–benefit analyses or neuroscience to scientifically ‘prove’ that the early years matter, and matter critically, in order to make our case for funding and fair working conditions. However, silencing care in this equation leaves us personally and professionally diminished. In its most positive forms, ECEC enables a community of people who learn together to understand, engage with and participate in the human and non-human world around them, to care for their patch on the planet, to care about learning and be excited by the possibilities learning offers in the life of every child and every educator. The provocation of this Special Issue then is how can we care about care in early childhood education in all its ambiguities, complexities, singularity and multiplicity?

Exploring the care in ECEC

This Special Issue invited researchers to explore the place of care in ECEC. It invited an opening up of research, reflection and discussion on the specificities, mulitplicities and ambiguities of care with regard to our work with children and families. Common themes across the papers are of power, politics, and regulation and the ways in which these reduce, and sometimes erase, the capacity to reflect upon the complexity of care in ECEC.

The first paper in this Special Issue by Rachel Langford et al. explores the need to reassert care within Canadian ECEC practices, politics and policies. They aim to reclaim and reassert a language of care and disrupt a neoliberal human capital approach to ECEC through advocating four ideas; that care is universal, that care is more than custodial, that care can be evaluated and that care should be central to ECEC policies. Through building their argument for these four ideas the authors show how care can and should be central to ECEC practice, politics and policy.

Teresa Aslanian then makes a material analysis of the ways in which the environment, or more specifically, a disruption of the early childhood environment, impacts caring relationships between staff and a group of 1- to 3-year-old children. Her analysis combines the feminist care ethics of Tronto with a posthuman perspective, making use of Malabou’s concept of ‘plasticity’ to explore the ways in which destruction of the material interrupted caring relationships and routines.

Like Langford et al., Andrea Delaune’s contribution focuses on the policy and politics of care in ECEC. Delaune first presents an historical overview of education and care in Aotearoa New Zealand and then investigates how care is located within the emergence of neoliberal, social investment policies and the current role of these policies in reinforcing a care and education divide. Delaune argues that a social investment paradigm positions ECEC within a welfare space, but with education as the aim. This repositioning focuses on children as learners, eliding the caring relationships that learning entails.

Kate MacCrimmon and Alexandra Lakind also explore the impact of a changing policy landscape on the provision of care, this time in Wisconsin, USA. They challenge the effects of introducing a quality rating and improvement system, suggesting that while the intent was to support the provision and quality of ECEC for low-income families, the policy effects actually reduced these. Their analysis illuminates some of the power and privilege embedded in the caring relationships of ECEC, particularly within a regulatory environment that can have deprofessionalising effects.

Also, exploring the regulatory and accountability environments produced through ongoing neoliberal policy processes, Nathan Archer analyses care in relational to summative assessment processes in England. As with MacCrimmon and Lakind, Archer argues that the effects of these policy environments impact relationships of care between educators, children and families. In his analysis, Archer asserts that care may be absent in the policy discourse of assessment and accountability, but it is present in the talk of teachers as they negotiate their way through the changing policy environment. This enables a position of hope and optimism for the role of care relationships in the work of early childhood educators.

The final contribution to this Special Issue represents an arts interaction between researchers, artists, children and teachers. Casey Meyers, Rochelle L Hostler and Joseph Hughes present artwork developed in collaboration with children in response to the question, ‘What does it mean to care?’. The resulting artwork invites us all to reflect upon how we are all entangled with care and to explore both the specific and the multiple effects of our entanglements.

As a collection, the papers reflect in various ways upon the multiple and specific entanglements of care in ECEC. Lenz-Taguchi (2010) suggests that there is a need to

… trouble and challenge what is going on in the educational area today, where pedagogical practices are being increasingly mainstreamed and normalised in relation to universal standards. These tendencies reduce the complexities of teaching and learning in an increasingly complex and diverse world. I argue we need a language that encompasses more of these complexities, and which can enable us to make use of them and thereby go beyond the prevailing binary divides that still haunt educational practices and theories. (p. 4)

The contributions in this issue all work towards troubling, reasserting and building a language of the complexity of care in ECEC that moves beyond the binary divide of education and care. They engage with theorising care and the ethics of care to be professionally articulate about why care matters, and matters deeply, in early childhood knowledges, identities and pedagogical relationships.