0-6-year-old children's fruitful care experiences in daycare are crucial for their well-being, learning and development, and the orientation towards care tasks also forms the core of daycare teachers’ professional identity. On the other hand, the political prioritization of care in the field of daycare does not seem to be very high; care is almost taken for granted as something that does not need special focus. With the project, we want to draw attention to how complex, demanding, multifaceted, unpredictable and not least important the care work in a daycare is. The project’s overall research question is: How can a care-oriented daycare pedagogy be strengthened in teacher training and in daycare with the aim of supporting children’s well-being and development?
Theoretically, the project draws on both psychodynamic and sociocultural developmental psychology, as the concept of educational care is aimed at the individual person’s and group’s well-being here and now - and possibly future development needs. The project works with the basic understanding that pedagogical care is shaped by policy and ideology and thus reflects culture- and institution-specific normativity and values which, for better or worse, have an impact on care.
The project, which is based on a collaboration between DPU, RUC and University College Copenhagen, consists of two sub-projects, which from each their own perspective, inter alia, must provide insight into the understanding of care and the importance of the conditions for care:
The first sub-project is about learning how care is balanced in practice between care for the individual child and care for the group of children. The vast majority of theories about care focus on the dyadic relationship between a care giver and a care recipient. In a daycare context, this understanding is by no means comprehensive, as a large part of the care is polyadic, because it involves several adults and children. The first part of the project is also concerned with investigating how care plays out in a complex social and cultural pedagogical context, and how different conditions affect care in/for groups of children and possibly constrict care. As part of this work to illuminate and strengthen pedagogical care in daycare, the investigation will include observations, interviews as well as recurring research circles where researchers and practitioners meet for joint reflection on research- and experience-based knowledge. The research circles, in combination with interviews and observations, will be used to examine practical and theoretical understandings of care.
The second sub-project deals with a care didactic effort in the 2nd internship period (6 months) in the daycare specialization as part of the pedagogy education program. The purpose of the effort is to strengthen the students’ skills as caregivers with a focus on a) pedagogical care, b) the daycare teacher as caregiver for the individual child and for the group, and c) pedagogical self-care. The study, which is carried out in a randomized design with random distribution of control and intervention groups, is grounded in the basic assumption that the caregiver education requires theoretical knowledge and cognitive processes, which are interwoven with personal processes and emotional experiences.