Time for slow care: Bringing slow pedagogy into conversation with ethics of care in the infant/toddler classroom

Abstract

This research presents the findings of an 8-month ethnographic case study of one infant/toddler classroom in the southeastern United States. Participants included the classroom’s two (white, female) teachers and a racially diverse group of 12 children between one to 2 years of age. Grounded within an ethics of care theoretical framework, this research was guided by the following research questions: (1) What are teachers’ lived experiences of care in this early childhood classroom community? and (2) How do those teachers understand their lived experiences of care? During data revisiting with teachers (Tobin and Hsueh, 2014), the concept of time—and particularly, slowness—emerged as a central connecting theme. The emergence of this central theme led to an overarching theoretically guided analysis of the data, implementing a feminist interpretation of Clark’s (2022) articulation of Slow Pedagogy in ECE to understand how slowness—a feminized quality antithetical to the furious pace of neoliberal education—is central to care in this context. In addition, a thematic analysis (Saldaña, 2021) of ethnographic data, including field notes, video, and photos gathered during participant observations, and four semi-structured teacher interviews, produced two foundational themes in teachers’ understandings and practices of care: Care as Emotional Presence, and Care as Acknowledgment. Findings introduce the concept of Slow Care, a noveltheorizing of care practices that emphasizes the importance of slow, relationally-guided temporalities, serving to contest and counter the growing neoliberal pressures of efficiency and productivity in early childhood policy and practice.

Keywords

Early childhood education ethics of care ethnography feminist theory slow pedagogy slow care

Early care and education (ECE) is a conceptually dichotomized field, with “care” widely considered to be separate from “education” in the neoliberal context of the Global North (Jarvis and Liebovich, 2015; Osgood, 2006a, 2006b; Powell et al., 2020; Prioletta and Davies, 2022; Sims, 2014). The history of this dichotomization is linked to a variety of interconnected dynamics, including: the societal devaluation of feminized work (Cohen and Huffman, 2003; Prioletta and Davies, 2022); the racialized and classed nature of the history of childcare (Andrew, 2015; Duffy, 2007; Osgood, 2005); the discursive construction of “professionalism” in Euro-Western culture (Campbell-Barr, 2018; Osgood, 2006b, 2010); and the global spread of the neoliberal discourse as a guiding force in the increasingly “schoolified” and marketized field of ECE (Bradbury, 2019; Roberts-Holmes and Moss, 2021).

These dynamics are highly complicated, and their historical roots and modern-day permutations are varied and diverse, but need not be explored in their full complexity to note their impact in both the micro- (i.e., daily practices) and macro- (i.e., policy) level discourse of the field, where it is clear to see that academic learning is prioritized over care. On a macro-level, US-based ECE teachers receive salaries far below those of their K-12 counterparts (Mclean et al., 2019; Phillips et al., 2016; Whitebook et al., 2014). There is a widespread push for “professionalization” of the field across the Global North, accomplished primarily through mandatory higher-ed training for early childhood teachers and by replacing feminized discourses of relationality, emotion, and care in policy, training, and curriculum with those more masculinized discourses of “child development” and “education” (Langford et al., 2017; Osgood, 2006b). On the micro-level, teachers distance their work from that of caregivers, decrying that they are “not babysitters” in an attempt to claim a dignity historically denied to their work (Nelson and Lewis, 2016). Instead, they present themselves as educated professionals trained to foster young children’s social-emotional, intellectual, and physical development, preparing them for future success.

Feminist ethics of care (Noddings, 1984; Tronto, 1993) encourages us to critically examine and contest this trend of local and national policies and practices to “professionalize” the field. From a critical feminist stance, although emphasizing the intellectual nature and developmental importance of care may result in greater respect accorded to the work of early childhood teachers, justifying care by situating its value within the masculinized framework of neoliberalism professionalism ultimately serves to reinforce the perspective that the feminized components of care are neither valuable nor valid. Importantly, this contestation of professionalization in the field is not to be misunderstood as advocacy for a return to early “mother-made-conscious” (Wiebe, 1896) conceptualizations that reduced care to a “maternal instinct” or “natural” orientation for women; that gendered conceptualization is as limiting, and as guided by patriarchal values, as the discourses of professionalism that followed. Instead, ethics of care scholarship argues that relationality and emotion are ontologically and ethically foundational principles that can be decoupled from maternalism and validated without requiring a masculinized reframing (Noddings, 2012). From this more balanced vantage point, we can resist essentialized understandings of gender while simultaneously elevating the value of those relational and emotional ways of doing, thinking, and being in early care and education that have been historically devalued simply by virtue of their implication in “the feminine.”

Slow pedagogy

Slow Pedagogy is an educational movement that re-examines the relationship between time and pedagogical practice (Clark, 2022; Collett et al., 2018; Payne and Wattchow, 2008). Built on the foundational premise that time holds a tyrannical reign in neoliberal educational environments where productivity and efficiency are equal to success, Slow Pedagogy invites the field of education to examine what is lost when we rush headlong toward our goals. This counterculture contestation of speed reflects Slow Pedagogy’s origins in the more prominent “Slow Movement,” which formally emerged in the early 2000s in response to the growing neoliberal imperative for speed in an accelerating and globalized world (Honoré, 2005). A diverse movement that reaches its philosophical tendrils into many different bodies of work and life, other Slow Movement offshoots include the Slow Food (Chrzan, 2004; Heitmann et al., 2011), Slow Cinema (Jorge and De Luca, 2015), Slow Philosophy (Walker, 2016), Slow Research (Adams et al., 2014; Ulmer, 2017) movements, to name a few. Contrary to its name, the Slow Movement does not demand or encourage slowness in all things. Instead, it advocates life lived at the “tempo giusto,” or the “right tempo” with which one is “fast when it makes sense to be fast, and…slow when slowness is called for.” (Honoré, 2005, p. 13). In a globalized world that rewards efficiency and leaves the slow behind, the Slow Movement considers moving at a “tempo giusto” can be considered an “act of organized resistance” (Elsaesser, 2021: p. 117)

Slow Pedagogy brings these same tenets to education, where its proponents advocate for deep pedagogical engagement and quality over quantity in learning outputs (Collett et al., 2018). This approach to teaching and learning runs counter to the neoliberal educational system of the United States and much of the Global North, which demands that teachers and students perform sufficiently in evaluative regimes of productivity or suffer the consequences: for students, poor grades, and a resulting loss of future educational opportunities; for teachers, reprimands from superiors, performance plans, and, at the most extreme, job loss (Ball, 2016). Slow Pedagogy argues that this standardized performance and evaluation system is a deeply flawed process that, although easily measured and evaluated, fails to produce the “richness and depth of intellectual texture” (Massey, 2002: p. 259), which constitutes deep learning. In providing alternatives to the current system of mandated speed, Slow Pedagogy challenges neoliberalism’s driving argument that we must “run ever faster in order to maintain our place in the world” (Rosa, 2019: p. 415), and instead asks “why must we run at all?”

Slow Pedagogy in early childhood education

Early childhood education is a field historically unburdend by the neoliberal pressures toward productivity, standardization, and measurement, but today it is increasingly becoming so (Ball, 2003; Bradbury and Robert-Holmes, 2017). Nationwide focus on “kindergarten readiness” in the United States (US), for instance, has resulted in a push-down of didactic instruction techniques and academic tools such as worksheets and testing into the daily lives of children still yet too young to enter the K-12 classroom (Bradbury, 2019). Play—once considered a primary imperative of early childhood development—has become “a casualty of the need to be seen to perform” (Clark, 2022: p. 16).

Early childhood professionals have voiced concern about this “schoolification” (Bradbury, 2019) of ECE and the developmentally inappropriate and culturally insensitive expectations inherent to many standardized curriculums and measures of quality (Bradbury, 2012; Brown et al., 2020; Gallant, 2009; Woodhead, 2006). Alison Clark offers one such critique in her 2022 book, “Slow Knowledge and the Unhurried Child,” where she brings Slow Pedagogy to the field of early childhood education to examine how the tyranny of speed and productivity is affecting our youngest learners, and to offer examples of how slowness can be cultivated in the early childhood classroom. Clark’s examples draw us away from questions of developmental milestones and standardized literacy education to the world of “timefullness,” (Bjornerud, 2019) where children and teachers can explore beaver dams and fallen trees in the forest, eat lunch together at a leisurely pace, and read stories as many times in a row as children would like.

Research overview

The following questions guided this ethnography of care practices: (1) What are teachers’ lived experiences of care in this early childhood classroom community? and (2) How do teachers understand these lived experiences of care? Participants included two full-time teachers and 12 children ages 1–2 years old in an infant/toddler lab school classroom in the United States. All research activities were approved by the researchers’ university-associated Institutional Review Board, and all participants provided informed consent to participate in the study (parents provided informed consent for the children). Participants have been given pseudonyms to protect participant confidentiality.

Research participants

The classroom community consisted of one full-time lead teacher, one full-time assistant teacher, and 12 children. Three student teachers were also present (one student from July through August and two from August through December), but due to their brief tenure in the classroom, we did not include them in our research.

Shelly, the lead teacher, is a White, married, 37-year-old woman with 15 years of experience as an early childhood teacher. She identifies as coming from a middle-class background. Maria, the assistant teacher, is a White, married, 30-year-old woman with 8 years of experience as an early childhood teacher. Maria also identifies as coming from a middle-class background. Both identified their teaching practices as being influenced by the Reggio Emilia approach, which prioritizes child-centered learning, emergent curriculum, pedagogical documentation, and understanding the teacher as a researcher in the classroom. As teachers in a university laboratory school, they had a history of regular participation in research activities.

The 12 children in the classroom were all between the ages of 1 to 2 years old for the duration of the study. Three of the children were identified as Black by their parents, two were identified as Asian, and three were identified as White. We did not collect any other demographic information from the children’s families.

Considerations of subjectivity and power

The lead researcher is a former early childhood teacher and a current early childhood researcher. She is a 32-year-old White woman from the US from a middle-class background who identifies as a feminist scholar. She had pre-existing relationships with the participants in this study (teachers and children both) due to her work as a part-time teacher in the school. This pre-existing relationship created a context in which considerations of subjectivity and power had to be carefully navigated (Peshkin, 1988). The lead researcher took several steps to accomplish this. First, she held bracketing conversations (Tufford and Newman, 2012) with the second author to establish her subjectivities as a former early childhood teacher and a former colleague to the research participants. She also established avenues to minimize the inherent power dynamics of researcher and research participant in the collaborative and relational procedures of feminist ethnography (Stacey, 1988). For instance, the lead researcher approached the teachers through an intermediary, the schools’ pedagogical coach with whom the teachers met regularly and had a close relationship. This process helped to minimize any pressure the teachers might have had to participate due to their existing relationship, as the pedagogical coach was invested in protecting the teachers’ interests rather than the researchers. She also encouraged the pedagogical coach to continue checking in with teachers during regular meetings throughout the research process.

The lead researcher’s relationship with the teachers and the classroom also held certain benefits. The study’s focus on care emerged from the researcher’s knowledge that this was an existing topic of interest for classroom teachers. The researcher’s deep pre-existing knowledge of classroom dynamics also adds trustworthiness and an emic perspective to the data interpretations presented below, as those interpretations were formed after a long association with the classroom context rather than solely during her 6-month period of immersion as a participant observer.

Data collection and analysis

Data collection and analysis occurred concurrently in an iterative process characteristic of interpretivist qualitative research (Denzin and Lincoln, 2017). Table 1 below details the three primary data collection and analysis stages over the 8 months of this study’s duration. Each phase is further explored in detail in the sections below. In all sections, the 'lead researcher' refers to the first author of this manuscript, who conceptualized the research, conducted all data collection and led data analysis procedures. Reflective first-person statements are written by, and from the perspective of, the first author/lead researcher. The second author assisted in data analysis and interpretation.

Phase 1: Broad ethnographic observation

During Phase One of the study, the lead researcher engaged in participant observation at the research site for approximately 6 to 8 hours a week, making broad ethnographic observations. As the lead researcher has been employed at the research site previously, she held a high degree of familiarity with the classroom of study and had existing relationships with the children and teachers. As such, the work of gaining entry and initial reconnaissance (Carspecken, 1996) had already been completed by the study’s inception, allowing for a relatively brief period of initial observation. However, the transition to a research role in the classroom community still required careful attention. For example, although the researcher had already spent dozens of hours in the classroom as a teacher, she had never done so with the explicit intention of observing and documenting care practices.

Data collection (Phase 1) began with a broad survey of the environment, asking the classic ethnographic question “What is going on here?” (Spradley, 1980) regarding how care would present in the infant/toddler classroom. The lead researcher documented and indexed in the field notes any interactions that met any of the many definitions of care that have been established through ethics of care theorizing over the last four decades—including care as a dyadic action of responsiveness and engagement (Noddings, 1984), care as a moral and political ethic (Gilligan, 1982; Tronto, 1993), and care as emotional labor (Colley, 2011). Data were collected through field notes, photos, and videos. The lead researcher also engaged in informal conversations with the teaching team regarding her observations and thoughts regarding the care practices in the classroom. After each classroom observation, the lead researcher digitized her field notes and wrote conceptual memos to document her ongoing thoughts.

Table 1.

Research phases.

Phase one: Jul–OctBroad Ethnographic Observation	Phase two: Oct–JanTeacher Interviews& Focused Observations	Phase three: Feb–AprData Revisiting& Member Checks
10-week broad ethnographic participant observation in the target classroom (6–8 h per week) Research memoing regarding emergent themes in ethnographic field data Informal conversation with the teaching team regarding observations and emerging themes	1:1 semi-structured interviews with full-time teachers (topic: Teacher understandings+practices of care, with reference to ethnographic field data) In vivo coding of teacher interviews to identify themes in teachers’ understandings and practices of care Interview care themes used to identify and index salient ethnographic field data Focused classroom observations (2–4 h per week) to collect additional video data, which was indexed according to interview-derived themes	1:1 data revisiting interviews with full-time teachers to member-check interview care themes & give interpretations of field notes and photo/video data salient to themes Theoretical analysis of final care themes; consistent teacher references to time in video revisiting interviews used to identify Slow Pedagogy as the interpretive theory Member checking of final themes and theoretical interpretation with full-time teachers

Phase 2: Teacher interviews and focused observations

After several months of participant observation, the lead researcher had developed a broad familiarity with classroom norms, daily structures, and standard practices. The researcher had also mapped out patterns to illustrate how the individuals of the classroom community related to each other and the various ways that care was enacted in the classroom. At this point, she moved into Phase Two of the research project, during which she conducted two 90-min semi-structured interviews (one each with the lead teacher and assistant teacher) to determine a participant-derived, contextually based, and multifaceted conceptualization of care.

These interviews were transcribed and subsequently coded according to Saldaña’s (2021) framework for thematic analysis. Line-by-line “in vivo” coding procedures using participants’ verbatim words were used to establish initial codes, which were then grouped thematically to determine final themes in teachers’ understandings of care. These final themes were then used to index existing observational data to establish salient examples of video, photo, and field note data. Table 2, below, provides examples of the coding process. The lead researcher also conducted focused observations (Spradley, 1980) to document additional instances of care that matched the final themes of teachers’ conceptualizations.

Table 2.

Coding examples.

Full participant quote	In vivo quote	Initial theme	Final theme
“…For like my nonverbal kids, being able to sit with those children and like looking into their eyes was so valuable…just taking the second to invest in the moment created a whole different feel for what this caring task was meant for.”	“…Being able to sit with those children and like looking into their eyes was so valuable…just taking the second to invest in the moment created a whole different feel for what this caring task was meant for.”	Care as presence	Care as emotional presence
“…A connection of being in the moment, instead of being distracted from them. So taking like putting that person in full vision of like, I’m here with you, and we’re gonna do these things together. And I’m not gonna get distracted by the 16 other children while I’m invested in your time at this moment in this task.”	“…A connection of being in the moment, instead of being distracted from them…putting that person in full vision of like, I’m here with you, and we’re gonna do these things together.”	Care as presence	Care as emotional presence
“Anybody can hold a bottle…but if I just take a second to be involved with this moment, sitting here, looking into the child’s eyes…”	“Anybody can hold a bottle…but if I just take a second to be involved with this moment, sitting here, looking into the child’s eyes…”	Care as presence	Care as emotional presence
“Conflicts are going to happen, and when they do, your job is to help support them, and so validating their emotions and saying, “Oh, it looks like you are feeling sad. Why are you feeling sad? Do you want to tell me?	“…Your job is to help support them, and so validating their emotions and saying, “Oh, it looks like you are feeling sad. Why are you feeling sad?	Care as Validation	Care as acknowledgment
“When I think of a conflict between children, like if somebody hurt somebody, I would go over and sympathize with the person who got hurt first and acknowledge that that person is feeling sad.”	“…Like if somebody hurt somebody, I would go over and sympathize with the person who got hurt first and acknowledge that that person is feeling sad	Care as acknowledgment	Care as acknowledgment
“Caring is like when a child gets hurt, and I acknowledged that they fell down…it’s acknowledgment, it’s walking over and saying, ouch, like noticing them feeling like that child was seen and heard is a part of care.”	“Caring is like when a child gets hurt, and I acknowledged that they fell down…it’s acknowledgment	Care as acknowledgment	Care as acknowledgment

Phase 3: Data revisiting and member checks

During Phase Three, the lead researcher conducted an additional semi-structured interview with each teacher to engage in member checking (Braun and Clark, 2022) and video data revisiting (Tobin and Hsueh, 2014). The researcher first reviewed established care themes with teachers to ensure that they accurately represented their understanding of care in their classroom. After receiving teacher confirmation of themes, the researcher presented teachers with video data indexed as salient to the interview-derived conceptualizations of care established during Phase Two, and asked teachers to provide their interpretations. In this final stage of the project, the concept of temporality in care began to emerge as both teachers repeatedly referenced the importance of slowness as they reviewed video data from classroom observations. Additionally, they engaged non-verbal cues, using verbal tempo and body language to indicate slowness as they spoke about care. The researchers subsequently used this newly established focus on time to identify the overarching theoretical lens of Slow Pedagogy, which was then used to interpret all research data, including these Phase Three teacher interviews.

Situating the findings: The importance of temporality

Reflecting on my research in this infant/toddler classroom, one of the most striking moments for me was when, one afternoon very early on in my fieldwork, I lay on the floor with four children and two teachers. There was no agenda other than to pass the time together—no activities to engage with, no intention to overtly teach or learn. We simply lay on the floor and laughed and were present with each other. Children requested books to be read and climbed over and on the adults’ bodies. In my conceptual memo from that day, I wrote: “I am so struck reflecting on the emotional experience of the informal family-like afternoon…. There wasn’t any structure there. We were just being in relationship and shared space together. It felt so good to me, and there was an understanding that it was okay that everyone was just enjoying… themselves. Why can’t this be childcare? Why must there be so many activities and schedules and rushing children from place to place?”

When I brought this memo to Maria’s attention months later, during our video revisiting interview, I felt the resonance in the room when she finished reading, looked at me, and softly said: “Why can’t this be true? Why can’t this be childcare?” This excerpt and question illustrate the tension between what is desired by the teachers of this early childhood classroom and what is expected of them by dominant cultural discourse. The response to Maria’s statement, ‘Why can’t this be true?” lies within the cultural phenomenon that sparked the Slow Movement: the neoliberal imperative for productivity, efficiency, and a constantly accelerating speed. Early childhood classrooms in the United States, and the teachers and children within them, are governed by these same imperatives, those hasty cultural rhythms of economically driven societies that devalue any endeavor deemed “too slow.” Within this hegemonic temporal framework and US ideologies of “quality” and “productive” education, a lazy afternoon spent simply “being with” others is considered a waste of time unless, perhaps, reframed as “social-emotional” learning that serves to cultivate the human capital of the children in that space.

The theme of slow temporalities in care was replete through all forms of data collected for this study, not simply in the excerpt I shared with Maria. In field notes, videos, interviews, informal conversations, and researcher memos, we found recurring implicit and explicit verbal and non-verbal references to slowness. There were, of course, some instances when the teachers intentionally rushed during their care practices—notably, for instance, to prevent physical aggression between children. This aligns with the concept of “tempo giusto” as we explored earlier: rushing to stop a push or a bite is the “right pace” for that situation, less so when the task at hand is feeding a child a bottle. The core of their care practices, the ideal they aspired to, was a slow, embodied version of care. Shelly and Maria’s slow ethic of care offers a vivid portrait of care as a temporal ethical encounter in the early childhood classroom, a way of being that provides a counternarrative to the macro-level neoliberal discourse within which the classroom is situated. We found that the temporalities governing early childhood classrooms were contested in this space through their actions and reactions, and their questioning the dominant fast-paced movement.

Grounded in interpretations of Shelly and Maria’s experiences and perspectives, this research offers the concept of Slow Care for consideration in early childhood scholarship and practice: a feminist and counter-hegemonic conceptualization of care that foregrounds the slow, the intimate, and the emotional. This slow way of being and caring may not be counter-hegemonic in cultural settings where slowness is more highly prioritized (Italy comes to mind, as evidenced in the Reggio Emilia approach; Rinaldi 2005), but within the cultural context of the United States and other neoliberal societies in the Global North, it most certainly is. In these contexts, this slow approach must be implemented in opposition to the constant cultural pressure to optimize human capital production in early childhood. Slow Care, however, cannot be optimized. It cannot be sped up, made more efficient, or productive. Instead, it takes the time it takes and recognizes that time is well spent.

In the findings below, we detail the two components constituting Slow Care in this classroom community: Care as Emotional Presence and Care as Acknowledgment. These themes were generated through thematic analysis of field observations and interviews with Shelly and Maria and confirmed by these teachers through member checking. They consider these two themes the fundamental prongs of their counter-hegemonic, temporally grounded approach to care.

Theme 1: Care as emotional presence

In our individual interviews, Shelly and Maria repeatedly underscored the importance of emotional presence in care routines—those daily caretaking tasks that are often relegated to the realm of the “less important”: diaper changes, bottle feedings, helping a child to blow their nose. According to Shelly, “anyone can hold a bottle,” but although “it is easy to provide general care…when you really want to reach someone, you have to do the work.” As Maria put it, “A connection of being in the moment, instead of being distracted from them…So putting that person in full vision of ‘I’m here with you, and we’re gonna do these things together….’”

To Shelly and Maria, time and particularly slowness were inextricably linked to “doing the work.” In our interview, Shelly described the difference:

You know, I guess it makes me think of diaper changes. We could rush through them and make them a very fast process, or we can take our time and calmly wipe a child’s face after snack. Talk to them, saying, “You really enjoyed the nut butter and rice cakes today. You know, I love how you are really trying your new food…. Let’s wipe your hands, all right now.”

She said this in a slow, almost hypnotic tone, followed by an example of the opposite: “All right, let’s change your diaper, all right, here we go,” she said at a breakneck pace, miming changing a diaper as quickly and efficiently as possible. As a participant observer, I began to perform this slow way of being and noted many moments where I intentionally blocked out the rest of the world to connect with one child for a small moment”. This excerpt from my field notes provides an example:

“Came to sit by Hank while he drinks his bottle. I was so drawn to him, laying there looking so sweet propped up on the beanbag. I lowered myself down to his level, lay on the floor, and just gazed into his eyes while he drank. He looked back at me. I feel love, contentment, peace.”

The experience of mindful attention described above is the process that Nel Noddings (1984) describes as “engrossment,” an attentive, receptive experience of “feeling together,” in which the carer becomes affectively immersed in the lived experience of the one-cared-for. In Noddings’ ethics of care, engrossment is accompanied by motivational displacement, which requires the carer to replace their own goals and motivations with those of the one-cared-for. Engrossment, however, takes time, and total motivational displacement is often impossible in a context where external (often institutional) forces often dictate the carer’s motivations. Noddings recognizes this in her work, stating that, in order to care, the teacher “must put aside, temporarily, the demands of the institution. She needs time to build a relation of care and trust” (Noddings, 2012: p. 774).

Regarding these external pressures, Shelly and Maria’s classroom was privileged: on the whole, their classroom was far less dictated by institutional requirements and policies than most ECE programs in the United States. Although their availability to provide emotional presence to one child was often interrupted by the more immediate needs of another, their daily schedule was primarily arranged according to the children’s needs. This freedom (due in part to the school’s independence as a lab school; its philosophical alignment with a child-centered Italian-inspired approach; and ample opportunities for reflective professional development) is a luxury afforded to few early childhood teachers, who are increasingly subject to requirements to implement any of the prescriptive curricula that are common in ECE programs (Haslip and Gullo, 2018).

Lacking the institutional imperative toward speed, the barriers to slowness were mostly for Shelly and Maria mainly were those of self-monitoring in relation to cultural norms of productivity, a phenomenon that Shelly described as a ‘mental block’:

“Sometimes it’s my own self that gets in the way because I’m wanting to move through the “we’ve gotta get through this, and this, and this, and this.” And I’m thinking of my schedule, and I’m thinking of what’s next, or that I need to step out of the room for this meeting, or whatever…. sometimes it’s getting over my own mental block, I guess you could say…. sometimes it’s just my own mental processing, and I need to be like. “All right, Shelly, put your priority back where it needs to be.”

Shelly’s perceived pressure to quickly move on to the next task on her mental to-do list indicates her citizenship within a neoliberal world where efficiency and productivity are often the highest benchmarks of success. Daily care routines, in their mundanity, can often become casualties of the cultural imperative to always, as Shelly says, “get through this, and this, and this, and this….” at top speed. At this breakneck pace, slow diaper changes, leisurely bottle feedings, and long hugs can quickly turn into perceived barriers to efficiency, just something to ‘get through.’ In his 2004 book, In Praise of Slowness, Slow Movement leader Carl Honoré notes that his exploration of slowness was catalyzed by the realization that he was consistently rushing through his son’s bedtime routine to maximize his daily productivity. However, as Honoré discovered, and Shelly and Maria conveyed in their interviews, emotional presence in care cannot be rushed. The “deepest and most tender human feelings” (Noddings 1984: p. 87) do not operate on the schedule of the neoliberal clock.

Slowness in care invites us to understand care routines not as irksome stutters in the otherwise smoothly operating machinery of productivity but as valuable moments of connection. This connection, however, can only occur if we slow down and feel in solidarity with the person who is receiving our care; for “attention without feeling…is only a report…empathy [is] necessary if the attention [is] to matter” (Oliver, 2009).

Theme 2: Care as acknowledgment

In addition to the predictable needs associated with daily caretaking routines, children’s care needs often manifest in the unpredictable and the emotional: a child stumbles and skins their knee, crying out in surprise and pain; they scream in frustration as a friend takes their toy or wail in sadness as their father walks away, leaving them in their classroom. Just as with daily caretaking routines, it can be tempting for adults to dismiss children’s emotional needs as less important than the urgent tasks that need to be managed. The data illustrated how Shelly and Maria, however, align with an ethic of care that demands that, when a child experiences these unpredictable and turbulent emotional disruptions, those providing care do not simply ‘solve the problem’ at top speed but instead take the time to fully acknowledge the experience, emotions, and viewpoint of the child. As Maria puts it, “Caring is when a child gets hurt, and I acknowledge that they fell down… it’s acknowledgment; it’s walking over and saying, “Ouch!” noticing them feeling…. That child was seen and heard, and that is a part of care.”

Shelly describes this acknowledgment as a practice of “verbalizing and validating” the child’s feelings - a practice they both agree that Maria exemplified on the playground one afternoon when Noah, nearly 2 years old, broke down in tears when he could not climb to the top of a climbing structure on the playground. In my recorded video, Maria turned away from the larger group and toward the crying Noah. She crouched down to his level, opening her arms. He fell against her body crying, and she held him on her lap while softly saying, “I know, I know. That was hard. You really wanted to get to the top.” In reviewing this video with me, Maria told me that her intention in that moment was to convey to this child: “I know that this is hard, and I can hear your emotions. I can feel your emotions. I’m with you with these emotions.” To her, it was not the words themselves that were most meaningful but the intention and time of the associated actions. As she told me:

“It would be really easy in passing to say, “Oh, I know. That was hard,” but that is not the same as…when I got down on the floor, bent down to his level. To me, in that video, it showed that I cared for him by being present with him in that exact moment, getting on his level…. I shut everyone else out, and I stayed extremely focused on just Noah.”

In this moment, what Maria demonstrated, both verbally and nonverbally, required slowness in multiple regards. Most obviously, she took the time to connect with Noah in this moment of emotional turmoil - to truly understand his emotions and allow him the time to experience them. However, this moment was also predicated on the months of Slow Care that Maria had engaged in up to this point that allowed her to fully acknowledge Noah at that moment - not simply a child in need, but Noah, the boy who loves to run and jump and so desperately wanted to reach the top of the climbing structure; the boy who often feels overwhelmed by his own strong emotions. She knows him. Not simply as any early childhood professional knows a child due to their training, but as an individual - and in that moment, she took the time to acknowledge him fully.

In a cultural context where children’s thoughts and emotions are regularly invalidated when they contrast with the thoughts and emotions of adults, thoughtfully and responsively acknowledging children’s perspectives without equivocation constitutes a radical act. Carlina Rinaldi (2005) refers to genuine and responsive engagement with children’s ideas as a ‘pedagogy of listening.” Merely listening, however, is insufficient and does not encompass the pedagogy to which Rinaldi refers: to engage in authentic listening, one must make room for ‘otherness’ (Berg and Seeber, 2016). Children do not experience the world in the same way that adults do. Their perspectives are ‘other’ and are so often Othered, as when adults dismiss them due to a perceived lack of maturity or ability to verbalize their views adequately. As such, practicing a pedagogy of listening requires teachers to slow down to sublimate their own perspectives into those of the child; they must “dwell, construct, formulate, reformulate, and negotiate their thinking, knowledge, and questions through active listening” (Chung, 2023: p. 2).

Shelly and Maria listened to the children in their care: not simply by hearing their words but by displacing their adult thoughts and emotions to engage in a slow, sensitive, and embodied practice of attunement to the children’s experiences. Explorations of this type of engagement are not new; in the context of care, what Rinaldi’s (2005) ‘pedagogy of listening’ resembles what Noddings (1984) described as ‘attunement’ and Manning (2009) termed ‘relational merging.’ What is new in Shelly and Maria’s descriptions of the process, however, is the emphasis on how temporally grounded it is: they intentionally put their other obligations on pause and ‘shut everything else out’ to connect emotionally and physically with the child in need of care.

Maria’s encounter with Noah, above, provides one illustrative example of how acknowledgment was provided in care encounters. However, this example is one of the innumerable instances within the complete data set where Maria and Shelly ‘shut everything else out’ to attune to a child needing care. During emotionally intense conflicts, the teachers would slowly and gently hold a child through their feelings of frustration, sadness, and dismay. When a difficult drop-off left a child sobbing on the floor, rather than try to distract the child with an exciting activity or dismiss their child’s feelings, Maria and Shelly would sit with them and say things such as “I know. You really didn’t want your dad to leave today.” Acknowledgment as Slow Care permeated the classroom at every turn, and the result was clear: children appeared to feel safe to express the full extent of their feelings and seemed secure in their belief that, whatever those feelings were, they would be seen and heard by their caregivers.

Discussion

This research provides a window into two teachers’ experiences and understandings of care in a university laboratory school setting in the southeastern United States. These teachers’ perspectives are influenced by myriad contextual factors and the manner in which each teacher’s sociopolitical positionalities and personal subjectivities encounter those contextual elements. Shelly and Maria are both white women in their 30's from middle-class backgrounds working at a progressive university lab school. In part, their perspectives reflect the dominant culture discourse in which they were raised, and the discourses of Whiteness that pervade educational institutions in the United States. Yet, they are not solely derived from such: their perspectives also emerge from the various academic, political, and cultural genealogies of praxis that they have engaged in their professional development work over their years of employment at the center. The specific models of professional development at this center were locally designed by administrators who have been influenced by post-structuralist and post-colonial feminism, reconceptualist scholarship, and cross-cultural and indigenous scholarship. Experiences within this community of practice focused on anti-racist, decolonizing, and anti-capitalist theorizing that has historically generated critical deconstruction of discourses of time and capitalistic productivity. It is possible that longitudinal engagement with these perspectives influenced Shelly and Maria’s pedagogy of Slow Care, even if they did not explicitly state such in their interviews and conversations with the lead researcher. Thus, the findings in this research should be viewed as early and limited beginnings of theorizing Slow Care in early childhood education; findings that detail the perspectives of two women whose histories, subjectivities, and discursive beliefs/practices reside at a particular intersection of the cultural, the historical, and the sociopolitical.

And yet, even though derived from a single context, these findings point to possibilities of discursive change in globalized policy in early care and education. Within current neoliberal temporal frameworks, the alternative, responsive, and slow temporalities described in this article are “an impossibility” (Tesar et al., 2021: p. 3). This research presents a counternarrative that challenges neoliberal imperatives in policy and practice and provides an example of an alternative: Slow Care. If the ideals of Slow Care were incorporated into the standards of best practice within neoliberal environments—such as NAEYC’s (2022) Developmentally Appropriate Practice in the United States or the Early Years Learning Framework in Australia (DEEWR, 2009)—infant/toddler classrooms could better reflect the fact that our youngest children “ha[ve] yet to become beholden to a construct of time in which past, present, and future are clearly delineated” (Tesar et al., 2021: p. 3). A policy shift in this direction would not only directly benefit the children who are served by early childhood programs but would also constitute a tangible challenge to the global expansion of neoliberal temporalities.

We believe understanding this type of care as a pedagogy is critical towards its acceptance by governing bodies: in slowing down, Maria and Shelly were not simply “not going fast” or failing to meet the expectations of dominant discourse; instead, they prioritized slowness as an intentional pedagogical practice of care. In doing so, they offer the field an example of a professional practice that reprioritizes care as an emotional and temporal practice central to early childhood education. Notably, this pedagogical framing refrains from backsliding into essentialized understandings of care as “women’s work” and instead offers care as an act of resistance and an intentionally cultivated alternative to the neoliberal pressures in early childhood policy and standards. Through Slow Care, we offer children care that is not judged by its economic efficiency but instead by its depth of connection and responsiveness.

Future directions

To more broadly understand the presence and possibilities of Slow Care in ECE, we encourage further research in various early childhood settings with teachers of varied identities, backgrounds, and pedagogical perspectives. In this way, future research into temporalities of care will encompass the depth and breadth of identities and backgrounds that constitute the early childhood workforce and examine how those nearly innumerable contingencies interact with the school and community context to invoke temporal practices of care. This would include research that addresses how neoliberal temporalities are encountered, replicated, and/or resisted within non-Western contexts as Western ECE pedagogy and policy continue to expand globally.

We would also encourage further research into the bi-directional relationship between teachers’ temporal conceptualizations of care and administrative, local, and national policies. From a top-down perspective, how do the largely neoliberal policies of early care and education centers in the Global North affect the temporalities of care in the early childhood classroom? Further, what are teachers’ experiences as they contest and/or align with the fast-paced temporalities demanded by such policies? From a grassroots perspective, what are the possibilities of Slow Care as an emergent political resistance against such policies?

Finally, we see possibilities to extend this work through posthuman theories of childhood and early care and education (see: Malone et al., 2020; Somerville, 2020). In cracking open the assumptions of time in the early childhood classroom, we believe there are possibilities for considering how children—in their temporally “Other” state—experience the world in more-than-human ways.

Footnotes

Declaration of conflicting interests

The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Funding

The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

ORCID iD

Cassie Sorrells

Cassie Sorrells is an instructor of early childhood teacher education at University of Tennessee Knoxville in the Department of Child and Family Studies. Her research relies on critical feminist methodologies to investigate the sociological and cultural foundation of early care and education in the United States. Her most recent work explores the intersectional and political nature of emotion and care for young children and teachers in infant/toddler classrooms. She also engages community-based action research to co-construct and explore contextually-relevant research questions with classroom teachers.

Samara Madrid Akpovo is an Associate Professor in the Department of Child and Family Studies at the University of Tennessee Knoxville, USA. Her research has focused on the intercultural and emotional lives of adults and young children in diverse educational contexts using cross-cultural and collaborative ethnographic methods. Her research also examines early childhood teachers’ intercultural and global understandings during virtual exchange programs and international field experiences.

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