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Care and social sustainability in early childhood education : transnational perspectives
Weldemariam, Kassahun Chan, Angel Engdahl, Ingrid Samuelsson, Ingrid Katiba, Timothy Chepkewsi Habte, Tewodros Muchanga, Roland
Weldemariam, Kassahun
Chan, Angel
Engdahl, Ingrid
Samuelsson, Ingrid
Katiba, Timothy Chepkewsi
Habte, Tewodros
Muchanga, Roland
Abstract
This article explores how the notion of care is conceptualised and described in early childhood education policies across countries in the majority (Ethiopia, Kenya and Zambia) and minority (New Zealand and Sweden) world. A central focus is the relationship and balance between care and education. The authors examined whether there are trends and tendencies to strengthen or weaken the care/education component at the expense of the other. Grounded in local and national knowledge, the authors employed a cross-national collaborative inquiry approach and interrogated the notion of care while extrapolating its implications for the endeavour to design socially sustainable early childhood education. The results revealed that care has remained ingrained within policies in the minority world, while there is a tendency to view it as separate from education in the majority world. Although quantitative goals for early childhood education and care still dominate the majority world, the importance of care and sustainable development are present in all policy documents across the five nations. The authors concluded that strengthening these promising policy endeavours paves the way towards effective educare approaches, which lay the foundation for social sustainability in early childhood education.
Keywords
care, collaborative inquiry, early childhood education, educare, majority and minority world, policy, social sustainability
Date
2022
Type
Journal article
Journal
Book
Volume
14
Issue
9
Page Range
1-15
Article Number
ACU Department
Institute for Learning Sciences and Teacher Education (ILSTE)
Faculty of Education and Arts
Faculty of Education and Arts
Relation URI
Source URL
Event URL
Open Access Status
Published as ‘gold’ (paid) open access
License
CC BY 4.0
File Access
Open
Notes
© 2022 by the authors. Licensee MDPI, Basel, Switzerland
This article is an open access article distributed under the terms and conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) license (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/).
This article is an open access article distributed under the terms and conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) license (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/).