Towards Communities of Compassion: Exploring What Affords a Compassion Enabling Environment in Early Childhood Education

Abstract

This study explores what opportunities early childhood education (ECE) environments afford for experiencing compassion and the barriers/challenges to this, and seeks to illuminate what constitutes a compassion enabling environment. In the context of our increasingly complex world and the challenges it presents, there is a need for an alternative narrative in early education that focuses on the broader educational goals of individual and collective well-being. In face of which compassion, a core competency for sustainability, is foundational for thriving, connectedness and well-being, while supporting that of others (human and nonhuman).

A multi-sited ethnographic methodology was adopted with an interpretivist orientation. This involved a prolonged period of participant observation in two ECE settings in England: a nursery and a Reception year within a school. Semi-structured interviews were also conducted as well as focus groups with the participating children and staff in both Sites. Reflexive Thematic Analysis and Ethnographic Analysis using creative analytic practices were applied to analyse the materials generated during fieldwork. Spaces, relations and time formed three lenses for the descriptive interpretations which focused upon perceiving, experiencing and realising compassion in ECE environments.

The results illustrate the interrelation between ECE environments and children’s and adults’ experiences of compassion, alongside what enables realising it and opportunities afforded. With implications for practice and curriculum in particular the role of time, the ‘nature' and architecture of settings, gatherings, imagination, connection, engagement in a ‘living’ environment, community and story are highlighted, as well as challenges to compassion in ECE environments. This thesis contributes a deeper and wider understanding of compassion in ECE, and what co-curates compassion enabling environments in ways that afford opportunity to experience, explore and extend it. Learnings from which offer potential transferability to similar settings in promotion of educating for holistic being and living well together in our interconnected worlds.