Towards Communities of Compassion: Exploring What Affords a Compassion Enabling Environment in Early Childhood Education

With increasing concern for planetary well-being, fostering the
socio-emotional competency of compassion in Early Childhood Education
(ECE) is of high global relevance to well-being, global citizenship and
sustainability. However, there is a lack of knowledge regarding how
compassion is realised in context of both human and non-human aspects
of the ECE 'environment', which itself is integral to learning and
development. This study fills this research gap by focusing on the lived
experience of compassion for both children and practitioners within ECE
settings. Its aims to inform positive change in practice, pedagogy and
curriculum by exploring what opportunities ECE environments afford for
experiencing compassion and the barriers to this. In addition, it aims to
illuminate what constitutes a compassion enabling environment and
provide recommendations for practice enhancement regarding this. In
collaboration with the Flourish Project this timely study will make a
significant contribution by addressing the influence of daily social and
environmental contexts on mental health; recent recommendations
regarding increased focus on well-being in ECE and help inform
approaches to sustainability and global citizenship education within ECE
in light of sustainable development goal 4.7. Deeply ethical and
concerned with transformative change, this praxeological study is
innovatively suited to the age of participants and phenomenon of study.
It will use a theoretical assemblage and multi-sited phenomenological
ethnographic methodology involving participant observation and semi structured
interviews. Thematic analysis of the findings will use van
Manen's lifeworld existentials as an analytical frame and inform the
recommendations which will be consulted upon in focus groups.