An empirical research to re-contextualise the idea of care in preschool education

Care is an essential dimension of human life, but international educational policies in ECEC (Early Childhood Education and Care), especially where a neoliberal culture dominates, pay little attention to this paradigm, relegating care to a position of subalternity or interpreting it as a prerequisite to education. If education has the primary intent of favouring the full and integral development of all the dimensions of the person in order to allow each existence to realise its being in the world to the fullest, it is necessary to bring to the centre of pedagogical attention the paradigm of care that is little or scarcely conceptualised, in order to understand how schools, and in particular pre-schools, can be configured as contexts of concrete expression of care. The qualitative research at hand is situated within the ecological paradigm and a naturalistic epistemology, and is based on the generative question "What does a school of care consist of?". Answers to the first analytical question “What is caring?” has been provided by a scoping review analyzing the scientific literature aimed at identifying the scope of the concept of caring: the scoping review included 14 peer-reviewed, English language studies published between 2014 and 2022. The second sub-question "What are the behavioural indicators of caring?" is being investigated starting from a mapping of the behavioural indicators of caring traced in the literature, subsequently put into dialogue with the empirical phase of the research in order to allow for the capture of those indicators capable of defining the specificities of a caring-oriented educational action in early childhood education services through a phenomenological approach. The third question articulation of the research question, "How does the involvement of teachers help to promote the creation of care-oriented educational contexts?" has led to the elaboration, from the perspective of participatory research, of a 3-5 year old curriculum capable of supporting teachers in the creation of educational contexts oriented towards care paradigms. In ECEC, there is a need to move away from dichotomous visions in favour of integrated approaches. In order to do this, it is necessary to reconceptualize the idea of care in education and policy through the ethical and political perspective of care. The relationship that emerged between theoretical and empirical dimensions has allowed to increase the pedagogical knowledge and to qualify teachers' professionalism promoting the development of “schools of care”.