ABSTRACT

Emotions are a salient topic in contemporary research of early childhood education. Yet, research addressing such a fundamental emotion or phenomenon as compassion is still scarce. In this chapter, we present and elaborate a new perspective for researching compassion in early childhood education and care (ECEC) settings, which we call the Cultures of Compassion perspective. This perspective goes beyond the more conventional psychological and pedagogical perspectives on compassion, and conceptualizes compassion as an integral aspect of the daily lives of both adults and children. We explore narratives of compassion collected from master degree students of early childhood education. Firstly, we outline our perspective for researching compassion and distinguish it from other perspectives on compassion. After that we discuss how narratives can be used to research compassion. We then elaborate our conceptualization of compassion by analysing narratives of ECEC teachers. To ground our theoretical claims, our examples demonstrate the import and relevance of our theoretical conceptualizations for research of compassion in ECEC settings. Finally, we will pose some practical implications based on our analysis for developing ECEC practices.