“Every Day, Every Moment Concerned about Their Safety:” An Exploration across Contexts of Early Childhood Educators’ Safety-Related Identities
Abstract/Contents
- Abstract
- Contemporary scholarship and existing state policy have identified health and safety as essential elements of high-quality early childhood education (ECE). The perceptions of ECE teachers with regard to safety, however, remain largely unknown. Sociological and psychological understandings of identity figuring suggest that these ECE teachers’ beliefs are shaped by the contexts of their work. Through in-depth qualitative interviews, this grounded theory study explores how six early childhood teachers, working in three different types of preschool centers in the San Francisco Bay Area, perceive their safety-related professional roles (termed safety-related identities) within the context of their centers. Thematic analysis of interviews revealed 20 distinct safety-related identities that span child physical, emotional, and health safety, as well as teacher safety responsibilities. After triangulating interview findings with safety-related documentation across centers, the teachers in this study appear to have both common and unique safety understandings. With safety understood as a constant priority in their practice, all teachers were found to hold multiple safety-related identities at any given time, describing multi-tasking or negotiating between those identities to accommodate the diverse expectations of their work. These commonalities are noteworthy in and of themselves, while the divergences point to contextualized organizational priorities, teachers’ diverse personal experiences, and varying socioeconomic compositions across the neighborhoods studied. In light of these findings, implications and recommendations are provided for early childhood teacher educators and policymakers to consider how to better prepare the ECE workforce for the provision of high-quality safety in practice.
Description
| Type of resource | text |
|---|---|
| Date created | August 2020 |
Creators/Contributors
| Author | Hoffman, Katherine Steed |
|---|
Subjects
| Subject | preschool teachers |
|---|---|
| Subject | early childhood education |
| Subject | teacher beliefs |
| Subject | teacher role |
| Subject | child safety |
| Subject | teacher well-being |
| Subject | Stanford Graduate School of Education International Education Policy Analysis |
| Genre | Thesis |
Bibliographic information
| Related item | |
|---|---|
| Location | https://purl.stanford.edu/xh356nd5448 |
Access conditions
- Use and reproduction
- User agrees that, where applicable, content will not be used to identify or to otherwise infringe the privacy or confidentiality rights of individuals. Content distributed via the Stanford Digital Repository may be subject to additional license and use restrictions applied by the depositor.
- License
- This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Non Commercial 3.0 Unported license (CC BY-NC).
Collection
Graduate School of Education International Comparative Education Master's Monographs
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- Contact
- kate.steed.hoffman@gmail.com
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