Abstract:

Although care represents an essential dimension of human life (and of the ecologies in which we live), because it is what allows life to flourish and every existence to best realise its being in the world, current policies and the neo-liberal culture that strongly permeates Early Childhood Education and Care (ECEC) contexts do not consider this paradigm essential, not understanding that human beings need both to receive care from the moment they come into the world, and to care for themselves, others, nature and the world built by man.

And if, as the ministerial documents in Italy affirm, education has the task of promoting the full and integral development of all the dimensions of the person through the offer of a multiplicity of contexts of experience, it is then necessary to imagine a philosophy of education that takes care of making the potential of each subject involved in the educational process flourish from the cognitive, affective, bodily, spiritual, ethical, aesthetic, ecological and political points of view.
It then becomes central, in the contemporary Italian and international debate, to understand how preschools can become places of concrete expression of care.

It is from these stimuli that this research pathway begins: it is qualitative in nature and intends to lead, through a participatory approach, to the definition of a training curriculum capable of shaping educational contexts oriented towards the paradigms of care within the processes of education and learning in pre-school contexts. Such output will be achieved through a generative process that connects theoretical and empirical dimensions, demonstrating how this dialogue is the only way to increase pedagogical knowledge and, at the same time, raise the quality of the contexts of experience offered to children from 3 to 6 years of age, and the professional quality of those working in ECEC contexts.

The paper presents the preliminary phase of the research, which focuses on a scoping review of the international literature in order to map key concepts and key empirical studies from a broad-spectrum question, "What is care?", by placing the question in a defined research field, namely education and, specifically, preschools. The report will present the review process and the main features that emerged from the analysis of the studies, which are useful in constructing a unified but composite picture of the term in question in the ECEC context: (a) there is a predominant tendency to separate the terms care and education with an imbalance in favour of the second aspect, even though there are cultural contexts that try increase the dialogue between the two dimensions; (b) the marginalisation of care produces outcomes on the teachers' conceptions of professionalism, and fuels the difficulty of valuing care in everyday practices; (c) in many contexts, care is considered a natural peculiarity of women: this representation has generated a strong feminisation of work in education and the scarce social and economic recognition of the same.

Keywords:

Caring, Preschool, Formative curriculum, Teacher training.