“What does it mean to care?” Collaborative images of care within an early years center

Abstract

Posing the question, “What does it mean to care?” this visual work came about through a collaboration between teachers, children, and a local artist to render experiences of care from children’s daily lives within an early years laboratory school. Working from a perspective of material-discursive intra-activity (Barad, 2003, 2007), this inquiry explored the ways in which children’s and adults’ engagement with materials, such as paint, paper, and ink, for the purpose of collaboratively constructing images might challenge ideas about what care is in an early years setting. The resulting image-stories were displayed at a community event as a provocation for others to (re)consider how young children come to know care/caring as enmeshed within experiences of love, loss, and longing of responsibility for their classmates, of stewardship for the environment, of deep investment in daily work, and of coming to trust adults and children outside of their immediate families. While we have long recognized “care” as a fundamental curricular touchstone for teachers and young children (Noddings, 1988) and we continue to value moral orientations, such as kindness and respect, in our everyday enactments of practice, through this particular entanglement of children-adults-materials discourses, we have come to understand that “caring” emerges through multiple pathways and to multiple effects and can be articulated through multiple modalities. By presenting these images as the primary “text,” our intention is to provoke readers of this Special Issue to (re)consider both the specificity and multiplicity of care in young children’s school lives.