Leadership in early childhood education: socio-historical trajectories, care and institutional tensions

Research on leadership in early childhood education has shown that center directors often experience professional isolation and limited opportunities to exercise pedagogical agency. This study explores how directors of Chilean public early childhood centers construct and enact leadership, analyzing the role of emotional labor (EL) and its relationship with teacher well-being. Using an interpretive qualitative approach, with a multiple-case design and an ethnographic strategy (2017–2020), we examined Professional Learning Communities composed of early childhood leaders in two regions of the country. The study included narrative life-history interviews, participant observations, and focus groups, analyzed through constructivist Grounded Theory. The findings show that directors transform emotional labor into an ethical and relational leadership resource capable of sustaining collective well-being and resisting institutional standardization pressures. The study concludes that leadership in early childhood education transcends administrative functions, positioning itself as an ethical and political practice that weaves together care, emotionality, and professional sustainability, offering insights to rethink policies for training and supporting early educational leaders.