Caring well for children in ECEC from a wholeness approach – The role of moral imagination

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Abstract

In this paper, I propose a theoretical framework for understanding professional care in the context of Early Childhood and Care (ECEC). This proposal aims at further developing a cultural-historical wholeness approach to the central topic of professional care in ECEC. As inspirational source I explore the role of moral imagination and apply insights from moral philosophy in combination with cultural-historical wholeness approach to children's needs and development. I suggest to making a distinction between two main forms of caring corresponding to two different forms of moral imagination in caring well for children in ECEC: 1) Responsive caring, is the kind of care where the educators attend to children's needs for well-being in the here and now. In responsive caring moral imagination plays a role mainly in the shape of empathetic imagination. 2) Proactive caring is a strategic kind of caring for children where the educators attend to the child's motives, engagements and projects, collaborating with the child on transforming and expanding his/her participation possibilities in relationships and activities. This requires a future-oriented gaze at the child, and thus a different kind of moral imagination, based on extended anticipatory goals. Finally, I suggest that moral imagination has a central role to play also in developing and sustaining collective professional caring standards.

Introduction

Providing high quality care, theorizing care, and qualifying caring practices in professional pedagogical contexts is perhaps the most central educational issue in societies where caring for small children largely is outsourced and distributed among many caregivers, institutional settings and professions. However, concepts of care and developing practices of care-giving in educational settings is generally undertheorized, and not given much priority in a political climate where focus on quantifiable learning outcomes are at the forefront of policy. In the Danish ECEC curriculum the word “learning” is mentioned 89 times, “care” is mentioned one time, “needs” are mentioned two times, and “well-being” 6 times – this word count serve to illustrate the point, that it is indeed a learning discourse that dominates the ECEC field in these years (Gitz-Johansen, 2019, 56). This is not only a Danish/Scandinavian tendency, but a Western World tendency, and it matters greatly, because it directly influence what is valued, focused on, and given priority in the everyday life of our children (Rouse & Hadley, 2018; 169). Making visible the value, importance and difficulty of caring well for young children, is thus a necessary and much needed quest for ECEC researchers (Page, 2018). Even though the topic of care is downplayed in ECEC policies, it receives attention in research, however mostly among scholars persuaded by attachment theory. Despite this significant theoretical dominance in the field, there is a growing body of literature of care based on other traditions and disciplines: like cultural and discursive approaches, post-human/post-colonial critiques, childhood studies etc. I do not intend to review this important body of work, rather I wish to point to the fact that cultural historical psychology has left the topic of care largely unexplored and under-theorized. I aim to fill that gap by suggesting some first steps towards a theorization of professional care from a wholeness approach. Before doing so, it is crucial to keep in mind that caring for children, and describing what proper care entails necessarily reflect normativities, values and beliefs that are culturally specific. What we consider to be good care for children reflect societal conditions, power struggles, and lifestyles that are subject for considerable variation and change within and across time (Aslanian, 2015). However, it is a universal practice for adults to provide for children through caring, and a practice that is as old as mankind. In all cultures, the older generation cultivate certain concerns in the new generation– by promoting certain values, virtues, activities, and ways of doing things. The particular concerns promoted serve the goal of ensuring what the adults believe to enhance children's likelihood of becoming valued citizens in their respective communities as adults. Such believes (both folk and scientifically based) can be wrong and damaging. In the history of psychology behaviorism can prove to illustrate, with the extreme example of sky-high mortality rates among hospitalized infants in facilities run by the doctrines of “care” without physical contact, affection and attention from adults (Aslanian, 2015). In a Scandinavian/Western cultural context today, we believe physical contact, affection and attention from adults to be key to caring well for children, and we arrange for child rearing practices as a collaboration between family and ECEC context. In this article, I focus on describing the central compontents of caring well for children in ECEC, by using moral philosopher Tronto's (1993) terminology as a structure for the proposal. Since her generic theory is not specified to account for caring for children in the ECEC context, I substantiate her elements of caring with specifications from a wholeness approach to development, drawing upon cultural-historical theory of development and pedagogy. I find that moral imagination has a central role to play in caring well for children and that its presence in professional practices reflect a strong professional caring environment. I argue that adequate caring for children aim at two objectives calling for proper theoretical and practical attention. 1) Responsive caring directed at ensuring well-being in the here and now, 2) and proactive caring directed at ensuring the child's future possibilities. By developing a conceptualization of professional care, it becomes clear that we are in need of a more fine-grained vocabulary about both the components of high quality care, and about the concept of moral imagination. I suggest that In responsive and proactive caring moral imagination comes in two different shapes respectively: empathetic identification connects to responsive caring, as a more or less immediate response to a need, and extended anticipatory goals are necessary for the more strategic proactive caring. Moral imagination as a collective resource for caring well is intimately intertwined with a sense of agency, competence and shared professionalism on the part of the educators. In addition to providing a vocabulary for analyzing and understanding caring well in ECEC context, I also hope to illustrate the difficulties involved in mastering this work.

Section snippets

Moral imagination and care

I draw on moral philosophy and especially the concept of moral imagination in suggesting a wholeness approach to professional care in ECEC. Moral imagination is originally a term developed within the philosophy of ethics and moral epistemology – however, the concept is now attracting attention in other academic disciplines; nursing, law, business, and also in education. In the cultural historical scholarly tradition, the concept of moral imagination has recently been introduced and theorized by

Analysis

In the following, I shall specify some of the particularities related to taking care of children, according to a cultural-historical view of development and pedagogy in early childhood. Following from this short introduction to care from a wholeness approach, I specify Tronto's suggested caring elements of attention, responsibility, responsiveness and competence, supplemented with explications of how moral imagination enriches and qualifies caring. Finally, the analysis results in suggesting

Caring elements in ECEC

In the following, I shall substantiate further a wholeness approach to caring well for children in ECEC, by applying Tronto's (1993; 127) ethical elements of care; attentiveness, responsibility, responsivity and competence. I add to Tronto's contribution how these elements translate into a context of care for children in ECEC, and the role of moral imagination in that practice.

Responsive caring - in the here and now

Most of the distinct or obvious care-giving work in ECEC outplays as responses to children's immediate needs. The care giving may be experienced as just an intuitive reaction to the child's expressivity in communication: “you look sad; what's with you?” This is caring directed towards the well-being in the here and now and it is often compensatory in order to avoid something or having to repair something (like in comforting a child in distress). The moral imagination involved takes the shape of

Ensuring high standards of caring in ECEC

Caring well for children is a question of engaging in frequent relational encounters of emotional support and sharing in expressivity-responsivity cycles of communication. It shows in the interplay among educators, in the way the educators address each other and the children, and in activity-settings during everyday encounters. Caring is highly situated, spontaneously carried out, based on what appears to be intuitive; therefore, caregiving is also difficult to account for, recognize as a

Conclusion

Acknowledging that caring in ECEC is a manifold conflictual practice directed at many objectives is a first step to realizing the challenges embedded in this work. Inspired by moral philosopher, Tronto's suggested framework for defining and describing caring well – and a cultural-historical wholeness approach to children's wellbeing and development, I have proposed a conceptual skeleton for theorizing, analyzing and assessing caring work in the ECEC context. Moral imagination proves crucial, as

Funding

This research did not receive any specific grant from funding agencies in the public, commercial, or -not-for profit sectors.

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