Summary Module One

As cultivating an Ethics of Care is a lifelong, living, and contextual practice, download or purchase a hard copy of the Early Childhood Educators of British Columbia’s Code of Ethics. This is a valuable publication to add to ECE policies (family and employee handbooks), a guide to support meaningful, sometimes difficult, conversations as well as a foundational resource to model everyday practices and dispositions. Licensed early childhood educators in British Columbia are also mandated to follow this code of ethics set out by the Early Childhood Education Registry. 

Attending to the idea of care through an Ethics of Care is an essential knowledge and practice for relational leadership in ECE. Although early years leaders (whether in managerial positions, team leads, or role of inspiring early childhood educators) work in relationship with individuals, organizations, and/or a pair/group of colleagues, the field is also embedded within layers of local, provincial, national, and global historicities. As you learned, the perception of care in the Canadian context remains heavily gendered and devalued. It is also seen and taken up as an individual act(s) perpetuating hyper-individualism. 

An Ethics of Care offers the notion of care as a relational way of knowing and being beyond solely responding to a person’s needs. Taking up care in this manner commits to cultivating resistances, practices, processes, and policies which work toward the flourishing of all, human and other-than-human, within complex interconnected systems. 

Module Two: Standpoints and Dispositions underlines and expands this further. 

Reference

Early Childhood Educators of British Columbia. (2021). Code of ethics. https://www.ecebc.ca/resources-merchandise/code-of-ethics