Teachers gaze: an empirical investigation into caring

Care represents a fundamental dimension of human life, but international educational policies in ECEC (Early Childhood Education and Care) do not consider this paradigm essential. If education intends to be in relation to what is essential and necessary to life, it is then necessary to bring the idea that care represents the central paradigm of the pedagogical discourse back at the centre of the pedagogical debate and policies. To this end, it becomes a priority to question ourselves to understand how schools, and specifically schools for children aged 3 to 5, can be configured as schools of care. The qualitative research presented here intends to contribute to this effort, through a survey strategy focused on the dialogue between the theoretical dimension and the empirical dimension. This allows us to arrive at the elaboration of an educational curriculum capable of promoting the predisposition of educational contexts oriented to the paradigms of care through the understanding of the teachers' ways of being and acting in practice. The first part of the empirical phase of this research involved, in a participatory perspective, teachers from three municipal pre-schools. The aim was identifying, the behavioural indicators of care. Caring is in fact a practice and is defined through those ways of being, as Noddings writes, that return to the other the intention to procure benefit from the one who cares. The data collection instrument addressed narrative material, i.e. sixty written narratives of experiences of good and bad care experienced by teachers in their own childhood and professional context. The analysis of the data favoured the use of the empirical phenomenological method defined by Mortari, which is particularly fertile within a science of experience that pursues the aim of understanding actual experience. The choice of method is consistent with a circumstantial view of the method, i.e. with an evolutionary and emergent view of the method. The paper aims to present the path of data collection and deepen the process of analysis that, structured through some methodological principles and a series of heuristic actions and oriented by precise postures that characterize the acting of the researcher, has made possible the construction of a coding system and the elaboration of a descriptive theory of the lived experience.