The Invisibility of Educators’ Wellbeing

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A critique of the discursive landscape: Challenging the invisibility of early childhood educators’ wellbeing challenges the lack of research into the wellbeing of ECE educators and the resultant impacts to the children for whose care they are responsible.

Cumming et al, in an article published in Contemporary Issues in Early Childhood, explore the invisibility of educators’ wellbeing within studies of early childhood education and care. They “offer explanations for this invisibility by identifying and critiquing a number of discourses that have shaped, and continue to shape, early childhood education and educators’ positions within it”.

The authors of the report state that, well children’s wellbeing has received extensive research attention and has a central role in early childhood policy and curricular guidelines, the wellbeing of ECE educators has received only fragmentary research attention and is missing from policy and curricular documents.

They define wellbeing as follows:

A dynamic state, involving the interaction of individual, relational, work-environmental, and sociocultural-political aspects and contexts. Educators’ well-being is the responsibility of the individual and the agents of these contexts, requiring ongoing direct and indirect supports, across psychological, physiological and ethical dimensions.

They cite research by Nislin et al, Cassidy et al, and Ota et al, showing both the positive effects for children of educators’ well-being and the negative effects when educators’ well-being is compromised. Research by Kusma et al and Loygren has also found that compromised educator well-being can be financially costly for ECE services, families and the educators themselves.

They posit that work arrangements and conditions act as dividing practices. “Historical and sociopolitical discourses positions preschool as ‘educative’ and long day care as ‘caring’ can divide educators by association. Labelling ECE as care or education also influences funding, regulation and recognitions of services and educators.

The authors note that “liberal/progressive” discourses that focus on individual freedom, choice and creative expression have been highly significant for the construction of ECE and also have underpinned the focus on social justice in ECE. “ECEC thus emerged as a way of both ‘rescuing’ and ‘forming’ children, and also ‘reforming society’. However, they state that “rarely do the rights and interests of educators figure within these social justice discussions. Educators’ well-being is not only positioned below that of the children in their care, but is also most often invisible as an issue for attention.” They also comment that “ECEC, perhaps more than education at any other time in a child’s life, is also highly shaped by scientific discourses, especially those concerning child development.”

Whilst the quality of educators’ practice is an acknowledged part of facilitating children’s wellbeing, providing sensitive, responsive relationships, based on the principles of attachment theory, there is lack of acknowledgement that “having ‘the necessary time, resources and emotional energy’ is not always within educators’ control, due to a lack of regulatory or organizational supports, or compromised well-being.”

Historical gender discourses meant that, as women increasingly began to take on public roles, “powerful gender discourses constructed women as essentially different from men, with a natural maternalistic tendency to care for young children. This discursive space enabled ECEC to emerge as legitimate employment and education for women, but, at the same time, served to reinforce the notion that ECEC was both work done by women and work done for women.” The authors argue that, “In the 21st century, despite significant shifts in gender discourses, the feminization of the care and education of young children has been resistant to change, and continues to construct the care of children as primarily a women’s concern and requiring little professional preparation.”

They look at national/economic drivers that shape ECE policy, noting that, similarly to conditions 100 years ago, when ECEC was constructed as contributing to national wealth by providing work-related childcare, so “in contemporary society, the uncertainties of a globalized economy have increased national discourses and, once again, the ‘dialectic of the global and the local’ asserts the need for a strong workforce who are able to compete in an increasingly competitive market. Neo-liberal discourses uphold these nationalist discourses by asserting the role of the state in producing ‘enterprising and competitive entrepreneurs.”

Whilst research from organizational sciences disciplines has demonstrated benefits of employee wellbeing to productivity, and to some extent to profitability, the report states that organizational initiatives have tended to reactive rather than pro-active, initiated after something has gone wrong rather than as pro-active resources. In countries such as Australia and the UK, where ECEC services are primarily provided by small business, the authors note that “Research concerning small-business ownership in general suggests that spending on health promotion and injury prevention is lower than in large organisations, and little knowledge of workplace health and safety issues relevant to their sector.” They argue that “The predominance of for-profit ECEC services may further marginalize the well-being needs of educators if the costs associated with attending to educator well-being are seen as antithetical to profit-making, as well as to the cost-effective provision of services for families.” They cite a study by Tronto which raises concerns about the ability of market-driven systems of care to adequately deliver care for their employees if they cannot reasonably continue to maintain profit for the organization.

They make the following proposals to address these issues:

·      Pre-service education and ongoing professional learning curricula could, for example, include an appreciation of systemic issues and how educators can advocate for change at this level.

·      Educators’ advocacy needs to include a focus on their own wellbeing, as well as that of children and families.

·      Educators who work closely with teams of other educators may become more attentive to the wellbeing of their colleagues, increasing awareness of when and how responsibilities for educator wellbeing are either supported or overlooked.

·      By seeing the divisions of ‘education’ and ‘care’ as artificial discourse constructs, could produce very different questions by using the logic of ‘and’ rather than ‘or’, e.g. by considering the interrelation of educators’ and children’s wellbeing.

·      Tronto advocates shifting dominant neo-liberal discourses about care from those associated with welfare services to those that value care in policy and practice, note that “care is fundamental to the human condition, reflecting the idea that all people should expect to be able to live with dignity and respect. Langford et al note that “Valuing care as central to educators and their pedagogical work would be based on ‘a commitment to the values of relationality, contextual sensitivity, interdependency, respect and trust’.”

The authors conclude that “enabling conditions for thriving will ultimately increase organizational effectiveness – care and effectiveness can coexist.” “Acknowledging the importance of educators’ well-being, then, requires a shift….These moves require engagement with systemic problems, as well as with the historical biases and assumptions shaping the early childhood education field….”