Care in early childhood education and care: a review of the international literature

Although care represents an essential dimension of human life (and of the ecologies in which we live), because it is what allows life to flourish and every existence to best realise its being in the world, current policies and the neo-liberal culture that strongly permeates ECEC (Early Childhood Education and Care) contexts do not consider this paradigm essential. The paper presents the preliminary phase of a qualitative research on care in education, which focuses on a scoping review of the international literature in order to map key concepts and key empirical studies from a broad-spectrum question, "What is care?", by placing the question in a defined research field, namely education and, specifically, preschools.