Child care and COVID: Precarious communities in distanced times

Abstract

Drawing from an analysis of responses to COVID affecting the ECCE sector in the US, including the narratives of early childhood educators, we engage with several questions. These include: How is care work with children constructed and affected by COVID-19? How might current responses and policies be understood through the lens of social citizenship and the collective/the individual? How do these issues reflect the precarity of the ECCE sector? How are embodied and emotional aspects of care work manifesting in early educator/caregiver lives in the time of the pandemic? Who is caring for the caregivers and what care may be needed? How can we re-imagine the care of ourselves, and in relation to an ethics of care for the other?

Impact of the COVID-19 Pandemic on Habilitating Residential Communities for Unaccompanied Minors during the First Lockdown in Italy: The Educators’ Relational Perspective

“…Different from conventional situations, in which distant modality of learning management fell on parents, minors in the residential communities had to arrange school through online platforms without their assistance, even coping with an economically disadvantaged condition. In fact, as has been noted by others [ 40 , 41 ], distance learning deconstructed the key principles of democratic, inclusive, and embodied teaching. Unexpectedly, in our case, minors showed reaching full autonomy in managing distance learning and in achieving the required skills (“They were totally autonomous in the management of remote learning”).…”

“With Fear in Our Bellies”: A Pan-Canadian Conversation With Early Childhood Educators

“…The educators' stories spoke to their attempts to make meaning of their predicament as they mourned the way things once were and endeavoured to figure out what it meant for them as professionals if, as van Groll and Kummen (2021) noted, practice in the pandemic generated pedagogical and ethical tensions. As in other contexts, they especially grieved the loss of community and connection (Swadener et al, 2020). Their experiences of loss were inextricably linked to emotionality even though overt expressions of feeling have been deemed inappropriate and unprofessional in the techno-rationalist discourse (Osgood, 2010).…”

“…The precarious nature of their work combined with their low pay and status fostered the exploitative conditions for what Tronto (2013) referred to as privileged irresponsibility, wherein the privileged could opt out of caring roles to pursue more lucrative economic activities while ignoring the fears and hardships experienced by educators/carers (Zembylas et al, 2014). Swadener et al (2020) have asserted that "repairing this deeply fractured system requires the dismantling of the systems of oppression that have reinforced the disrespect and devaluation of the women (and men) who have always been essential" (p. 317). It was disheartening to them that even the pandemic did not legitimize or make their important work visible and, as in other studies, the additional worries and stress left them vulnerable to burnout, post-traumatic stress disorder, or mental health issues (Bigras et al, 2021;Gomes et al, 2021).…”

Maintaining Professional Standards in Early Childhood Teacher Preparation: Evaluating Adaptations to Fieldwork-Based Experiences During COVID-19

“…We recommend that instructors remain flexible and responsive to the ever-shifting landscape in teacher preparation as we continue to move through the pandemic. We consider the principles of social citizenship (Swadener et al, 2020 ) and what it could mean for people in our program to take care of themselves and their learning, but also to care for one another as we co-exist in our learning spaces. Our small program had three students leave in fall 2020, consistent with the 90% of teacher education programs that saw attrition during the pandemic (Peyton et al, 2020 ).…”

“…Early childhood care and education (ECEC) is essential to children and families during the pandemic (Murray, 2020 ). These new experiences, whether they be virtual with tiny faces in boxes on a computer screen (Swadener et al, 2020 ) or socially distanced classrooms (Levinson et al, 2020 ), require new approaches to teaching and learning. Online teaching and learning practices have been significantly developed over the last 20 years (Carrillo & Flores, 2020 ), with major emphasis on pedagogical approaches that increase student engagement and humanize the online classroom (Pacansky-Brock et al, 2020 ).…”