Refocusing care as central to teaching within ECE

As part of ongoing collaborations with associate and mentor teachers, we explore teachers’ decision making in order to help student teachers and others become aware of the myriad decisions and political choices made by teachers in their everyday work with children. In this article we are particularly interested in care, and in the way the idea of care is construed in education as a perhaps a less-valuable, or less-recognised context of learning. Two narratives are presented to provoke critical reflections of how teacher decision making might be re-centred and guided by care-full teaching as a way to understand the complexities of pedagogies within early childhood education.