Negotiating wellbeing and belonging in an early childhood centre: What children’s conflicts can teach us

Abstract

Introduction Early childhood (EC) teachers and kaiako in Aotearoa New Zealand are very familiar with the terms belonging and wellbeing—they are two of the five strands of the early learning curriculum, Te Whāriki, introduced into everyday EC pedagogical discourse with the launch of Te Whāriki in the mid-1990s. Each strand is described in a preamble followed by a set of goals and learning outcomes which elaborate how teachers might interpret the strand pedagogically. The 1996 version of the curriculum (Ministry of Education, 1996) also provided examples of “questions for reflection” to help teachers know if the learning outcomes had been achieved; in the refreshed 2017 version (Ministry of Education, 2017), the questions were replaced with statements of what “evidence of learning and development” might look like. Despite this profile, however, until relatively recently, belonging and wellbeing remained under-researched as pedagogical concepts in EC settings. Wellbeing and belonging