Reframing the Emotional Worlds of the Early Childhood Classroom

Samara Madrid, David Fernie, Rebecca Kantor, Samara Madrid, David Fernie, Rebecca Kantor

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781135051655
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Early Childhood Education

This volume examines the emotional world of the early childhood classroom as it affects young children (whose emotional wellbeing is crucial to successful learning), educators (for whom teaching is never a solely cognitive act), parents, and administrators. In a culture where issues such as bullying and teacher burnout comprise major challenges to student success, this book brings together diverse voices (researchers, practitioners, children, and parents) and multiple perspectives (theoretical and personal) to refocus attention on the pivotal role of emotion in schools.

To do so, editors Samara Madrid, David Fernie, and Rebecca Kantor envision emotion as a dynamic, fluid, and negotiated construct, performed and produced in the daily lives of children and adults alike. A nuanced yet cohesive analysis, Reframing the Emotional Worlds of the Early Childhood Classroom thus presents a challenge to the overriding concern with quantifiable classroom achievement that increasingly threatens to push the emotional lives of classroom participants to the margins of educational and public discourse.

1
Introduction to Reframing Emotion

Samara Madrid, David E. Fernie, and Rebecca Kantor

UNIVERSITY OF WYOMING, WHEELOCK COLLEGE, AND UNIVERSITY OF COLORADO, DENVER

The main purpose of this volume is to provoke new and productive thinking about the emotional lives of young children, parents, teachers, and administrators as they experience a range of emotions in early childhood settings. Attention to emotion has always been a part of the early childhood commitment to support all aspects of a child’s development. However, recent heightened attention to emotion in early childhood education has focused largely on developing curricula for young children in order to develop socio-emotional expression skills and strategies for self-regulation, or to implement intervention strategies intended to change or manage children’s behavior and promote socio-emotional learning (Bronson, 2000; Copple & Bredekamp, 2009; Epstein, 2009; Hyson, 2004; Jalongo, 2013; Salovey & Sluyter, 1997; Thompson, 2002; Webster-Stratton, 1999). These approaches seek to improve children’s behavior, promote their participation in group life as a student, and enhance their readiness to learn and preparation for kindergarten and later schooling.

Emotion in This Volume

This book, however, shifts the focus from looking at pedagogy’s role in the socio-emotional learning of young children toward a broader examination of the role of emotion in the early childhood world, for both adults and children, as emotion is embedded in relationships and daily contexts. Further, the purpose of this book is not to define emotion, to propose where emotion is located, or to debate the merits of various theoretical perspectives on emotion. Rather, the goal is to show how a wide range of emotions informs, affects, and directs children’s and adults’ lived experiences within early childhood. Markus and Kitiyama (1994) help us to confirm and articulate the focus of this book and the role of emotion as we see it:

We are not assuming that emotions are not felt or that they are not biological or even universal for that matter. The main argument is that emotions are not neutral to the social systems that exist in a culture. The ways emotions are organized within a particular culture are very much dependent upon the moral and social order, as well as ideological and political systems. Emotions, regardless of the location, are part of relationships. In short, emotions are social actions.

(p. 6)

This reframing and shift in focus move us away from examining only individual emotion or emotional self-regulation and management toward examining how emotions are lived, experienced, and negotiated in daily life among multiple social participants in early childhood educational settings.

Emotion has recently been shown to be a key factor in social functioning, decision making, and cognition, providing direction and serving as a “rudder” for our further experiences, actions, and transfer of knowledge. For example, Immordino-Yang (2011), in her study of the role of emotion in her young daughter’s poetry, highlights the importance of the social mind in learning and creating knowledge:

By virtue of its evolutionary connection to bodily feeling and survival, our social mind motivates us to create things that represent the meaning we have made by processes of noticing, feeling, and understanding so that others can notice and feel and understand what we have.

(pp. 134–135)

This perspective reveals how cognitive processes are profoundly affected by the emotional processes that Immordino-Yang and Damasio (2007) call “emotional thought.” These new advances in neuroscience research allow us to reconceptualize and to “look differently” at the complex and nuanced nature of how emotion is taken up, reproduced, enacted, and engaged with as children, teachers, administrators, and parents act and react to one another within social and cultural contexts.

During this time, when the current political context is focused primarily on the learning of disciplinary knowledge and academic skills, there is an increased need to shed light on the role of emotion, both in learning and in the overall well-being of children, teachers, and other educational participants (Boler, 1999; Day & Lee, 2011; Schutz & Pekrun, 2007; Schultz & Zembylas, 2009; Zembylas, 2005, 2007). In the last decade, an overriding concern with achievement and accountability threatens to push the emotional lives of classroom participants to the margins of educational and public discourse. Children, parents, teachers, and administrators feel the increased pressure, monitoring, and time constraints associated with standardization (Shutz & Pekrun, 2007). Has this focus on high-stakes accountability pushed the joy, wonder, and spontaneity out of the school and classroom space? What discourses of emotion are circulating now? What are the related effects on teachers’, children’s, parents’, and administrators’ well-being and happiness? How important are emotions to learning and academic achievement?

Along with valid concerns over the effects of this pushdown on young children’s educational life, there is a related concern about the quality and reality of adults’ emotional lives in classrooms. Teacher and administrator burnout and the low retention rates of new teachers in urban settings (and elsewhere) have been tied to the emotional dimensions of teachers’ experiences, to accountability pressures, and to teachers’ perceived lack of control—all of which can lead to “emotional exhaustion and depersonalization” (Larrivee, 2012, p. 22).

The co-editors concur with others who recognize that teaching is not solely a cognitive act: The emotional engagement of teachers matters, and is a primary factor in their personal well-being in the teacher role, teacher identity, job satisfaction, and job retention (Bullough, 2009; Day & Qing, 2009; Hargreaves, 1994, 1998; Larrivee, 2012; Meyer, 2009; Nias, 1999; Noddings 2011; Zembylas, 2005). Day and Lee (2011) suggest that teachers often report feeling positive emotions such as joy, love, and compassion, but also frequently experience negative emotions such as guilt, frustration, disappointment, anxiety, and fear when their hard-fought-for “professional identity is threatened by mandated reform, rather than renewal efforts” (p. 2).

This research is consonant with a related body of literature that suggests that early childhood teachers spend a great deal of time navigating the “emotional labor” of the job and dealing with the consequences of this process (Colley, 2006; Jacobson, 2003, 2008; Hargreaves, 1994, 1998; Osgood, 2006, 2010; Taggart, 2011; Troman, 2000; Tucker, 2010). For example, Madrid and Dunn-Kenney (2010) found the most common emotions discussed by a small group of early childhood educators were stress, worry, and frustration. Tucker (2010) also found that mental and physical breakdowns were predominant themes related to the stress and isolation of teaching.

At the same time, there is common discourse that discourages teachers from overtly sharing or overtly demonstrating the discomforting emotions that come with the daily interactions in classroom life and with children, colleagues, and parents. Teacher preparation is supposed to make teachers ready to teach and to arm them with professional knowledge and dispositions intended to dispel uncertainties and discomforts, to provide answers rather than to provoke questions. Stress and anxiety are often pushed underground because teachers worry about being viewed as unprofessional and/or incompetent and, sadly, there simply are few opportunities permitting difficult feelings to be examined, considered, and discussed in the workplace (Elfer & Dearnley, 2007; Jacobson, 2008)

Yet within the early childhood education field, both now and in its history, the traditional view is that love and caring motivate and dominate the emotional lives of early childhood teachers. Moyles (2001) notes that it can be difficult to separate the head from the heart, as well as the mother role from the formal teacher role, and it is necessary to combine them in order to meet the needs of the child and the teacher. Goldstein (1997), Noddings (1984, 1993), and Liston and Garrison (2004) have attempted to move this discussion of love toward a definition that is based on critical and feminist pedagogies, but the discourse has been slow to shift within the mainstream early childhood education field. Shields (2002), in her analysis of gender and emotion, outlines how women have been positioned as the loving “caregiver” because of the link between females and maternal emotions. Relatedly, Page (2011) found this discourse to exist not only among professionals in the field, but also among parents whose children attend early childhood centers. She found that mothers placed “vital importance” on the relationship between the caregiver and the child, noting that “the mothers in this study appeared to want adults who cared for their children to love them, though they don’t always call it love” (p. 11). Teachers’ valuing and feeling love and nurturance are not necessarily problematic, but this assumption does become problematic when teachers are positioned as natural caregivers because of being female, rather than as professionals who draw upon care as an aspect of their intentional teaching.

The emotional worlds of classrooms are more complex than any one particular emotion. Competing and contradictory narratives and paradoxes exist, particularly in early childhood education, because a “good teacher” is linked to the display of love and care, while being a professional is linked to emotional neutrality (Taggart, 2011; Moyles, 2001). Being a non-emotional professional, however, runs “counter to the beliefs and practices of the early-years professional, and this poses a very real threat to the professional integrity that practitioners cling to …” (Osgood, 2006, p. 191). And herein lies the conundrum: There is a current “call” for early childhood teachers to display love, care, and passion and to display professional emotional detachment, while also coping with the stress and demands inherent in working with colleagues, families, and children. Colley (2006) highlights these contradictions:

Alongside this prescribed curriculum, and the unwritten curriculum of emotional bonding, a further ‘hidden’ curriculum emerged as students talked about what they had learned as they participated in their work placements. Their narratives centered on coping with the emotional demands of the job, and revealed a vocational culture of detachment in the workplace, which contrasts somewhat with the nurturing ideal that is officially promoted.

(p. 21)

In the chapters and commentaries that follow, we present diverse stories that illustrate the emotional demands, emotional possibilities, and emotional realties of the early childhood world. Our stories illustrate what emotions mean within the everyday lives of people in these educational spaces. As noted at the beginning of this introductory chapter, we center on multiple responses/voices and refocus on emotions broadly, viewing them not solely as internal affective states, but as fluid, dynamic, negotiated, and social and cultural constructs that act as a guide in our daily lived experiences. In terms of reframing emotion, the co-editors identify three ways in which we are trying to shift the focus and lens in early childhood around emotion in this volume:

• 1) Location of emotion in social action: In these stories, the authors examine emotions as they are used, performed, and negotiated within social relationships and social action among children, teachers, administration, and parents. This reframing shifts the focus to emotions as they exist, are learned, and are communicated in the course of “social action.”
• 2) Multiple participants/voices: By combining the perspectives of teachers, children, parents, administrators, and researchers across and often within individual chapters, we reframe the reader’s vision of the complex nature of the emotional life of the classroom, not just simply looking at it from one social perspective, but from complementary perspectives that collectively create a more holistic sense of emotion in educational venues.
• 3) Expanded role of emotion and types of emotion: We examine what it feels like to be in one of the participant roles noted earlier, moving past “love and care” to illustrate how various emotional responses, including emotional discomfort, are also part of teaching and learning. The reframing of the diverse roles and types of emotion also resists thinking about emotions in binary or dualistic terms.

By looking across locations and roles, and by including multiple voices, we hope to complicate the idea of emotion and see the nuanced meaning of emotion as it is yoked to social action.

Structure and Themes of the Book

While we oriented the book to highlight the elements of location, voice, and roles/types, the invited authors naturally brought their own unique topics, stories, questions, and perspectives on emotion in the early childhood world. Our authors include parents, teachers, researchers, and administrators, along with experts who, through their insightful commentaries, provide yet another perspective on the chapter topics. As we worked with the chapter authors and expert commentaries as they took shape, we organized chapters under three section themes that emerged from the stories and data in the chapters: Just practices and emotional discomfort, places and spaces for emotional intimacy and challenge, and understanding emotion within roles and relationships.

Just Practices and Emotional Discomfort

Are justice and emotion two constructs that belong together? In considering the relationship between justice and emotion, we must first understand how our emotional investments and attachments guide how we conceptualize what is “best,” “good,” and “fair” for our young children and families in early education. Anyone who has been a social advocate can testify that justice and emotion are not separate: Often, our emotional responses and reactions motivate us to fight for the rights of those who are oppressed or subjected to inequitable regulations, policies, or practices. What role does emotion play when considering just and unjust early childhood practices and policies? How do teachers, children, administrators, and parents experience practices and policies that invoke emotional comfort and discomfort?

The first three chapters examine these questions as they illustrate how just practices and related emotion are lived and recounted by teachers, administrators, children, and parents. Each chapter shows that constructing emotion is a process that exists in situ and within systems of power and dominance; some of these systems oppress, and others transform. Justice is not simply an outcome, but is a continual process of reflection, resistance, and change. In contexts where oppressive policies and practices are prevalent, reflection and change engender people’s resistance and promote a self-focused concern with what feels “right” and “best” for them (i.e., this feels right to me so it must be just). In contrast, in settings where policies and practices focus on community problem-solving, people arrive at what is “right” for the “greater good” and are able to critically reflect on their emotional responses (Ahmed, 2004; Jacobson, 2003; M...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• CONTENTS
• Foreword
• 1 Introduction to Reframing Emotion
• PART I Just Practices and Emotional Discomfort
• PART II Place and Spaces for Emotional Intimacy and Challenge
• PART III Understanding Emotion within Roles and Relationships
• Contributors
• Index