Abstract
Care is an epistemological construct that requires intellectual sensibility and judgment. This chapter offers a way to understand the relationship between our actions and the construction of care as a form of knowledge. Drawing upon the French tradition of examining the richness within the everyday, the concept of ‘le quotidien’, ‘the dimension of lived experience that is involved in everyday life’ (Sheringham, Everyday life: theories and practices from surrealism to the present. Oxford, Oxford University Press, p. 2, 2006) is applied to early childhood education. The notion of le quotidien brings value to the often-overlooked aspects of everyday practice within infants’ and toddlers’ pedagogical spaces by acknowledging everyday moments as a space of transformation, invention, possibility and optimism. A 3-month case study was undertaken in an Australian long day care centre to investigate the epistemological nature of care. Through the use of pedagogically documented moments between children and educators, visibility is given to the capacity of the unseen relational space to construct shared values, revealing the intersubjective and intellectual nature of care.
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Mitchelmore, S., Degotardi, S., Fleet, A. (2017). The Richness of Everyday Moments: Bringing Visibility to the Qualities of Care Within Pedagogical Spaces. In: White, E.J., Dalli, C. (eds) Under-three Year Olds in Policy and Practice. Policy and Pedagogy with Under-three Year Olds: Cross-disciplinary Insights and Innovations. Springer, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-10-2275-3_6
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