Abstract
As our world faces up to the global challenge of the COVID-19 pandemic, it has become clear that care is essential to the sustenance of all our lives. This moment in our shared time reflects Tronto and Fisher’s early definition of care as ‘species activity that includes everything we do to maintain, continue, and repair our ‘world’ so that we can live in it as well as possible’ (in Tronto, 1993: 103). This definition has been widely used as a spring board for thinking about care in many and varied contexts, and many of the papers in this issue cite this definition. Within posthuman philosophies this thinking with care has synergies with Haraway’s (2016) point that humans and more than humans are sympoietic, ‘making with’, not autopoietic or self-forming. Such an argument enables a foregrounding of relational ontologies and a resistance of the valorisation of rational, autonomous, and individual human life. Puig de la Bellacasa (2017) notes the connection between Tronto and Fisher’s definition, referring as it does to ‘our world’, and the sustenance of more than human. Indeed, it is the more than human virus simply taking care of itself, that has precipitated the global crisis we currently face (see also Arndt, this issue).
As Gibbons (2007) argues, ‘education’s assimilation of care disrupts knowledge of who cares, how they care, where they care and why’ (p. 123). The pandemic has served to further highlight the politics of care, making space for public debate about who is worthy of care, who cares, for whom, and under what conditions. During the various lockdowns as the world’s countries responded to the pandemic, ‘essential workers’ continued their essential work, for example as medical practitioners, grocery store staff, cleaners and garbage collectors. As their children continued to require early childhood education and care, many early childhood educators became essential workers as well. While some early childhood provision remained available, many others closed their on-site classrooms, with early childhood educators expected to quickly find ways to engage with children online. These varied responses to COVID-19 lockdowns created educational equity issues. Issues such as accessibility to reliable internet connectivity and the affordability of to up-to-date digital devices to support remote/online learning have become ‘an elephant in the virtual room’. The widespread assumption is that everyone, including both the child and the early childhood educator/teacher would be ‘okay’ moving to online teaching and learning during a global pandemic are paradoxical. While remote teaching and learning has responded to the potential COVID-19 risks to health and safety, it has also required us to rethink what education and care mean for all children, teachers, and our societies. Shifting to a virtual meeting space has re(con)figured the meanings and relationships of care and education in the early years.
The COVID-19 pandemic has also required us to rethink and reconceptualise what care means in every domain of our lifeworlds. While marginalised, the notion of care in early childhood education has long been explored and debated from various perspectives (e.g. Goldstein, 1997; Page, 2011; Rockel, 2009). In our thinking with care in this Special Issue, we are exploring opportunities for building a vocabulary of care that acknowledges and values the centrality and complexity of the caring relationships that form the bedrock of early childhood educational environments. In public debates surrounding early childhood education, care is routinely trivialised and reduced as the practical and material work of maintaining small bodies. While this work must be done, in this issue the authors argue that care is also much more; care can also be what is not done or said, care can be time, space or distance respected and care can be oppressive. Care embodies power while also reflecting power relations. We argue that care is more than the routine labour of managing small bodies; care is important to the everyday work of teachers and to the everyday experiences of children and families in early childhood educational contexts. As we are all connected in this web of care, it is important that we (re)conceptualise the ways we see, talk and theorise care.
Philosophies, politics and pedagogies of care in the early years
In this Special Issue, we invited researchers to reflect on the philosophical, political and pedagogical implications of thinking with care in early childhood education. This invitation was issued before the global COVID-19 Pandemic struck, fundamentally changing our lives in 2020. Tapping into different but equally important onto-epistemological perspectives, the contributors in this Special Issue come together to examine, critique and provide critical reflections on the topics of care. Most of the papers in this issue reflect on the politics of care and consider care in the context of the pandemic, either in very small ways or as the central concept of their paper. Making the topic of care visible, each of the papers in this collection provides unique provocations to engage us in (re)thinking and (re)imagining the intra- and inter-relations of the politics of care.
The first paper in this Special Issue, by Beth Blue Swadener, Lacey Peters, Dana Frantz Bentley, Xiamara Diaz and Marianne Bloch, reflects upon the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on the work of early childhood teachers in the USA. The stories shared by the early childhood teachers are poignant and emotional, highlighting the invisible, but essential, nature of care in their work. The narratives highlight not only the importance of care in the work of the teachers, but also the importance of caring for the carers and the visceral emotional labour of educating and caring for toddlers.
Following this Teresa K. Aslanian reflects on the changing landscape of care in Norwegian kindergartens. To do this Aslanian argues for a shift in thinking about care as beyond dyadic or domestic relationships. Instead arguing for more complex thinking about caring as entangled with, and in co-production with, human and more than human connections. To do this she used portraiture to explore ideals of care and of flourishing in one early childhood educational setting in Norway.
Examining threads of care, Joanne Ailwood makes use of Braidotti’s concept of cartographies to peel back some of the power and knowledge relationships in care. In doing so, Ailwood argues that we can move our thinking from an equation of care as always ‘good’ or benign, to acknowledging that care is also messy, situated and indeed as sometimes oppressive or unwanted. Instead, she suggests that the right care at the right moment requires responsive, sensitive knowledge that should be recognised as serious professional work.
Sonja Arndt then makes use of Barad’s concept of diffraction, turning the idea of care around, ‘re-turning’, to think through, with and around care from various perspectives and from various angles. Considering care in this mobile way enables space for multiple possibilities for assemblages of care in our human and more-than-human worlds. Arndt challenges us to decentre the human and to think with, through, around care in its multiplicity, with intra-actions and diffractions; to move beyond easy answers and comfortable understandings about care.
Andrew Gibbons takes Derrida’s analytical concept of deconstruction to explore the positioning of care in the media reports during the COVID-19 pandemic time in New Zealand. In this paper, Gibbons discusses the problematics of separating care and education in early childhood education and teacher education. Gibbons calls for a rethinking in ‘seeing and accepting’ babysitting in relation and in connection to education to open up a critical discussion on the professional and ethical responsibility of teacher education to move away from perpetuating a dominant discourse that care work as babysitting has a less professional status in early childhood teacher education. Gibbons asserts that the binary construction of babysitters as carers and early childhood educators as professionals is problematic.
Lucinda Heimer makes use of critical race theory to unpack a dangerous salvation narrative in early childhood teacher education that constructs ‘teaching as an act of caring for others’. In this paper, Heimer draws from the data in a pilot study of early childhood preservice teachers’ practicum experiences in the USA to problematise a tokenistic way of discussing racism through notions of diversity in schools. In her analysis, Heimer discusses the importance of engaging preservice teachers in critical race theory and decolonising methodology to challenge and expand their professional and personal construction of us (the teachers) vs. them (the children/students). Heimer’s paper reminds us the importance of re-examining our stereotypical talk about ‘caring for others’ in our teacher education to avoid implicit bias and racism.
Taking up a feminist approach with post-structural sensibility, I-Fang Lee treats care and care work as a socio-political concept. Highlighting the early childhood education and care sector in Australia as an example, this paper problematises how care and care work in the early years has been narrowly constructed as a gendered notion of babysitting. In her analysis and discussion, Lee argues for the need to reconceptualise care work in a web of relations to understand the politics of care with a critical perspective to enable a different but much needed socio-political re-engineering of a more just and sustainable care and education for all children in Australia.
In the colloquium, Lisa Bryant reflects on the role of COVID-19 and the Australian Government’s responses in shifting debates about the provision of early childhood education and care. For a brief and shining moment in Australia, early childhood education was freely available. This moment highlighted the argument that has been made for decades – free, universal early childhood education and care is possible in Australia, if only there is the political will. What the stressful experience of COVID-19 has interjected are opportunities to engage in greater community and national discussion in Australia about the possibility of universal care and education in the early years and what this may mean for children, families and communities.
When we open up space to investigate power, privilege and politics of care it may also become possible to take more care with care. For care is ‘unthinkable as something abstracted from its situatedness’ (Puig de la Bellacasa, 2017: 7). Critical thinking with care invites us to be ethically responsive, and to understand care as situated and located in historical and social specificities (Donald, 2009; Todd, 2016). It enables thinking about care that recognises the interdependencies, reciprocities, and multidirectionalities of care (Milligan & Wiles, 2010). The papers in this Special Issue all push us to think deeply about care and the centrality of care in the work of early childhood educators. Making care visible is important and requires us to come together to critically reflect on ways forward for caring and building community together in early childhood education.