Compassion and emotional worlds in early childhood education

Abstract

In this chapter, we identify and explore three perspectives for researching and understanding compassion in early education settings, namely, the psychological, practice, and cultures of compassion perspectives. We argue that understanding such a complex phenomenon as compassion requires going beyond the psychological and practice perspectives to focus on and transform systemic or institutional causes of collective suffering. We need to harness compassion as a tool for social transformation—not only on the level of small group, face-to-face interactions (practices), but also on the level of large-scale social processes and policies.