Care matters: Reimagining early childhood education and care in a time of global pandemic

As our world faces up to the global challenge of the COVID-19 pandemic, it has become clear that care is essential to the sustenance of all our lives. This moment in our shared time reflects Tronto and Fisher’s early definition of care as ‘species activity that includes everything we do to maintain, continue, and repair our ‘world’ so that we can live in it as well as possible’ (in Tronto, 1993: 103). This definition has been widely used as a spring board for thinking about care in many and varied contexts, and many of the papers in this issue cite this definition. Within posthuman philosophies this thinking with care has synergies with Haraway’s (2016) point that humans and more than humans are sympoietic, ‘making with’, not autopoietic or self-forming. Such an argument enables a foregrounding of relational ontologies and a resistance of the valorisation of rational, autonomous, and individual human life. Puig de la Bellacasa (2017) notes the connection between Tronto and Fisher’s definition, referring as it does to ‘our world’, and the sustenance of more than human. Indeed, it is the more than human virus simply taking care of itself, that has precipitated the global crisis we currently face (see also Arndt, this issue). As Gibbons (2007) argues, ‘education’s assimilation of care disrupts knowledge of who cares, how they care, where they care and why’ (p. 123). The pandemic has served to further highlight the politics of care, making space for public debate about who is worthy of care, who cares, for whom, and under what conditions. During the various lockdowns as the world’s countries responded to the pandemic, ‘essential workers’ continued their essential work, for example as medical practitioners, grocery store staff, cleaners and garbage collectors. As their children continued to require early childhood education and care, many early childhood educators became essential workers as well. While some early childhood provision remained available, many others closed their on-site classrooms, with early childhood educators expected to quickly find ways to engage with children online. These varied responses to COVID-19 lockdowns created educational equity issues. Issues such as accessibility to reliable internet connectivity and the affordability of to up-to-date digital devices to support remote/online learning have become ‘an elephant in the virtual room’. The widespread assumption is that everyone, including both the child and the early childhood educator/ teacher would be ‘okay’ moving to online teaching and learning during a global pandemic are paradoxical. While remote teaching and learning has responded to the potential COVID-19 risks to