ABSTRACT
Compassion, or attributes related to it such as social responsibility, are considered important competences not only in a future society but also in our current everyday life. Educating teachers who can cultivate compassion requires understanding more deeply teachers’ own experiences of compassion as a part of their work. In this chapter, we explore narratives of compassion collected from master’s degree students of early childhood education. Based on our analyses of the narratives, we report student’s experiences of compassion. We focus especially on the following issues: which events trigger compassionate responses; who gives and who receives responses, in what form and in what conditions; how people talk about and make sense of compassion in their everyday life. Implications for teacher training are discussed.
