Developing a Loving Pedagogy in the Early Years

How Love Fits with Professional Practice

Tamsin Grimmer

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• Print ISBN: 9780367902667
• eBook ISBN: 9781000390650
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Early Childhood Education

Care and caring are key to early childhood education and yet love can be viewed as a taboo word within early childhood settings. This book guides practitioners through the potentially problematic area of loving the children they care for. It shows where a loving pedagogy can fit within professional practice and how this can enrich experiences for children and educators.

The book explores how educators can support their children by holding them in mind, valuing them and promoting their best interests. Focusing on how relationships, attachment and connections underpin our settings and practice, the chapters cover:

• the fundamentals of professional love
• appropriate touch in practice
• the different ways in which children feel loved
• the rights of the child
• empowering children through love
• working with parents and carers.

Including case studies and questions for reflection, this is vital reading for practitioners wanting to develop a nurturing and loving pedagogy that places the child at the centre of their practice.

1Defining love

Introduction

The need to be loved can be described as a basic human need (Maslow, 2013). I have found that most professional educators, like me, have very deep feelings for the children in their care. Many would describe this as a sort of professional love. However love is not a term that is synonymous with education and the term is rarely used within early childhood education and care. But what do we actually mean when we use the word ‘love’ and how can we relate this to an educational context? This chapter will share various definitions of love and attempt to define it within an early childhood context to clarify what is meant when the term is used. It will look at practical examples of these definitions and share a little about the research that has been completed in this field.

Defining love

Defining love is not as simple as it sounds. Love is an abstract concept. It is not easily defined and yet is so full of meaning and depth. Love means different things in different contexts. You can love in various ways and perhaps to a greater or lesser extent. For example, I love my mum very differently to how I love my husband and I love my own children differently to how I have loved children I have cared for as a childminder or teacher. But I would still call it love. In many languages there are a variety of words to sum up these meanings. However in English there is one word to encompass all these subtly different circumstances, which can be problematic because they mean such different things and some could be described as morally inappropriate in relation to children.

Love is a word that could be viewed as ‘out of bounds’ by some early childhood educators. This could be because of a popular understanding of love which inextricably links it to sexual desire and intimacy (Aslanian, 2018; Cousins, 2017). Defining love in this way would be inappropriate within the context of early childhood education and understandably makes some educators wary of using the term. However, love is not confined to the romantic notion of lovers. It is also a word that we use within the context of family and friends, nature and even our favourite foods. As educators we need to reclaim the word ‘love’ and ‘loving pedagogy’ and use them appropriately in our settings to describe our intense feelings and our ethos that underpins our practice.

What do we mean when we talk of love? A deep feeling, or a desire to want the best for someone? It is interesting that when we talk to people about love and what they mean by the word, we might get very different answers depending on age, culture, languages spoken and so on. For example, I would suggest that love is not simply a feeling or an emotion; it is much more about deliberate actions, like acting in the best interests of someone else, looking out for them and enjoying spending time together. Whereas someone else might suggest that love is about attraction or passion and definitely about the way you feel.

The Collins Online Dictionary defines the verb ‘to love’ as involving more than just emotions: “You say that you love someone when their happiness is very important to you, so that you behave in a kind and caring way towards them” (Collins Online Dictionary, 2020). Generally speaking, it is accepted that loving others also involves a certain etiquette or behaviour and this idea is explored more fully in Chapter 7 when I discuss holding children in mind.

Friendship, Westview Day Nursery

We believe that it is really important for children to understand about friendship, which we see as the first stage of love. We encourage children to talk about friends and often play games that encourage social interaction. For example, before lunch we meet together as a group and often sing songs together. During this song one child chooses a friend to dance with at the end of each verse. We often find that children might not initially want to dance but choose to when invited by their friends.

While I was researching how to define love in an educational context, I came across an article written for SecEd, a magazine and website that supports secondary teachers in the UK. The author describes how, after beginning a new headship in a secondary school, he asked his team about what we mean as parents when we state we love our children. He suggested that, “We mean that we are committed to caring for and protecting our children. We will treat our children as individuals, with different needs and expectations. We will put their interests before our own” (Wood, 2013: 1). He goes on to say that the teacher’s role and parent’s role are practically identical in this desire.

This definition talks about our commitment to care and protect, cater for individual needs and the necessity to ‘put their interests before our own’. This self-less notion often typifies love in a romantic sense: ‘Do you love someone enough to give them your last Rolo?’ springs to mind! But also, on a more serious note, it is this self-less love that defines parental love, when pushed to extremes, if you think about families who are starving and a parent who gives their child the last morsel of food they have. Putting other people first does not necessarily fit with many of the ideas within contemporary society, where we are invited to view ourselves as having a right to look after our own interests and put ourselves first. Despite this, most educators would agree that a loving pedagogy keeps the child in the centre and thus promotes their needs above our own.

The characteristics of love

When we think about defining love, we sometimes think about the different characteristics of love or the manifestations of love. When someone loves someone else, how do they act or which actions typify their behaviour? People may think of religious texts, and one that is very widely known and regularly read at marriage ceremonies is a passage from the Bible, the collection of writings that Christians refer to as their scripture. In one of the best definitions of love that I have read, it states:

Love is patient, love is kind. It does not envy, it does not boast, it is not proud. It does not dishonour others, it is not self-seeking, it is not easily angered, it keeps no record of wrongs. Love does not delight in evil but rejoices with the truth. It always protects, always trusts, always hopes, always perseveres. Love never fails.

(1 Corinthians 13: 4–8, Holy Bible, 2011)

Although this passage is relating to love in the context of a loving God, I feel that it can be useful in helping us to unpick the different characteristics of love in terms of our relationship with the children. In this table I have taken each adjective or phrase and attempted to find examples from practice of when we see this in action.

Love statement	Example from practice
Love is patient	We try to be patient with the children, for example when we know that it will take longer for them to put on their own wellies than if we help them, but we wait and let them do it for themselves.
Love is kind	When we seek out a specific toy that we know a particular child will love or when we plan certain activities with individual children in mind.
Love does not envy	We need to role-model how to react when we feel envious or jealous so that children will learn how to respond appropriately. For example, I talk about really liking my friend’s new bag and ask the children, is it OK for me to take the bag because I really want it? So we illustrate that it is understandable to have the feelings of being envious or jealous but we must be careful not to act upon these feelings.
Love does not boast	We would not dream of saying we are better than the children or we know more than one of our colleagues. Acting in a loving way is not being boastful or thinking of ourselves as better than others.
Love is not proud	This is not about celebrating achievements – we should teach children to take pride in what they do. This is actually referring to self-pride and being arrogant or being unable to admit that we are wrong. Acting in a loving way would be telling the children when we have made a mistake and explaining why we would do things differently another time.
Love does not dishonour others	This refers to having good manners, being respectful and not being rude to other people. Again, we role model this to our children.
Love is not self-seeking	We do not seek our own fulfilment but instead we put the children’s needs first, selflessness. Love is also not demanding our own way but allowing others to lead and make their own choices too, even when they are different from ours.
Love is not easily angered	This is when we take a deep breath, repeat an instruction for the nth time and still remain calm. Also when we are working with children we do not take offence at the things they say because we know that they are young and may not fully under...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• 1 Defining love
• 2 Problematising love
• 3 Professional love
• 4 Tactile nature of a loving pedagogy
• 5 The language(s) of love – love in practice
• 6 The empowerment of children through love
• 7 Holding children in mind
• 8 Loving relationships
• 9 Concluding thoughts
• Afterword: Demonstrating a loving pedagogy during a pandemic
• Index