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

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With increasing concern for planetary well-being, fostering thesocio-emotional competency of compassion in Early Childhood Education(ECE) is of high global relevance to well-being, global citizenship andsustainability. However, there is a lack of knowledge regarding howcompassion is realised in context of both human and non-human aspectsof the ECE 'environment', which itself is integral to learning anddevelopment. This study fills this research gap by focusing on the livedexperience of compassion for both children and practitioners within ECEsettings. Its aims to inform positive change in practice, pedagogy andcurriculum by exploring what opportunities ECE environments afford forexperiencing compassion and the barriers to this. In addition, it aims toilluminate what constitutes a compassion enabling environment andprovide recommendations for practice enhancement regarding this. Incollaboration with the Flourish Project this timely study will make asignificant contribution by addressing the influence of daily social andenvironmental contexts on mental health; recent recommendationsregarding increased focus on well-being in ECE and help informapproaches to sustainability and global citizenship education within ECEin light of sustainable development goal 4.7. Deeply ethical andconcerned with transformative change, this praxeological study isinnovatively suited to the age of participants and phenomenon of study.It will use a theoretical assemblage and multi-sited phenomenologicalethnographic methodology involving participant observation and semi structuredinterviews. Thematic analysis of the findings will use vanManen's lifeworld existentials as an analytical frame and inform therecommendations which will be consulted upon in focus groups.