Early Childhood Educators’ Perspectives on Love and Care
Bibliographic record
Abstract
ABSTRACT Early Childhood Educators’ Perspectives on Love and Care Katherine Pauls, Ph.D. Concordia University, 2024 The concept of love in early childhood education is complex and challenging to define. However, understanding early childhood educators' views on love is essential for supporting educators and children in childcare settings. This phenomenological study examines early childhood educators’ beliefs and expressions of love and how they differentiate between love and care in their interactions with children. Their perspectives include, amongst others, influences from parents, coworkers and children. Eight early childhood educators from Montreal, Canada, who work with children under five years of age were recruited for this study. They participated in in-depth individual and focus group interviews. During the interviews, the participants were asked questions about their perspectives on love and care in their childcare settings as well as inspirations and challenges to showing love. They each gave concrete examples of how they showed love, including physical affection, curriculum actions and emotional support. The focus group discussions allowed participants to share their thoughts on personal and traditional definitions of love, deepening the dialogue around these complex concepts. The data was analyzed using In Vivo and Emotion coding and four themes were identified: (1) How Educators Believe They Show Love, (2) Factors That Educators Believe Shape the Way They Show Love, (3) Factors Educators Believe Act as Barriers and Challenges to Showing Love, and (4) How Educators Understand Love and Care in Their Work. These themes provide valuable insights into the educators' experiences and interactions within early childhood settings, highlighting the emotional intricacies of their roles, specifically as they alter their expressions of love and care for the children. This research has important implications for early childhood education training and support, helping pre-service teachers better understand their work's emotional dimensions and navigate the challenges of forming and maintaining meaningful relationships in childcare environments.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.005 | 0.006 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.015 | 0.011 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.006 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.005 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.005 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".