When ECEs arrive at a staff meeting, a problem-solving session about a struggling child, or a workshop (which they are attending very regularly), no one wastes any time. They start pushing tables and chairs into a meeting format, conversing about the day or giving each other reminders for tomorrow, bantering loudly over the sounds of the furniture squeaking across the floor, adjusting the set-up on the fly, with head nods and quick gestures. ECEs are usually physical people who use a lot of body language. They’re bored to death unless they’re multitasking. They organize and improve, organize and improve. They live in the realm of the actionable, and for most of them, anything else is tedium.
Meeting after meeting, workshop after workshop, I am impressed by ECEs’ up-to-their-elbows version of being truly “all in”. They are all-in during business hours too, sacrificing half of their break time to do something like give someone a puffer, or make call to reassure a parent. They pour their hearts into their jobs; helping children grow, learn how to solve problems, nurture a caring conscience, attune to and care for their own feelings and bodies, and deepen relationships with others. Children, especially those who need help the most, can exhaust us. ECEs go the distance. The ‘reward’ – a child who stops themselves from hitting, puts a peer’s needs ahead of their own desires, uses the bathroom independently, or develops a secure attachment to us – only comes after months, and sometimes years, of grinding dedication.
I am an ECE who is also a theory and research junkie – catch me with a developmental neuroscience textbook and Magda Gerber’s RIE manual literally on my nightstand. But direct-service ECEs, (whether they moonlight as theory junkies or not!) are actually shaping best practice in the other direction, from the concrete to the conceptual. They have this fascinating way of observing- readjusting-observing-readjusting, until they hit the breakthrough point on how to support this particular child, or navigate that particular group. Which is a type of knowledge that is closer to the present (the only moment there is), and certainly closer to what is true.
There could never be another type of human I would admire more than an Early Childhood Educator. Like parents, ECEs are doing the most important job of all; setting in place abilities to care, cooperate, and self-reflect. As the world loses a little more structure and uncertainty abounds, children act it out in their feelings and behaviour. Meanwhile, ECEs have their heads down, continuing on with what Vandana Shiva calls “the REAL work of society”. Year after year, I am deeply grateful to learn from these methodical, intuitive, compassionate, and dedicated carers. Cheers to another ECE APPRECIATION DAY!
*This goes out to all my supervisors too. Anyone on the inside knows how incredulously vast your capacity is <3*
Situating Pedagogy 