Creating Early Childhood Settings as Beloved Communities in the Covid Era: Closeness Without Touch?

Abstract

Early childhood settings that center closeness and community are severely challenged by our current reality. How can we teach children to be lovingly connected ---- especially through their bodies --- while also keeping children away from one another and naming physical closeness and touch as dangerous? Loving touch was already contentious before the pandemic: concerns about inappropriate touch made educators, administrators and families nervous and vigilant. A growing focus on neo-liberal agendas which privilege academic achievement over relationship building also make it difficult to make love and touch central organizing principles. The Covid pandemic has altered and deepened worries about physical proximity and touch, and has conflated concerns for safety from disease with previous concerns about how touch fits into a classroom. Explanations offered to students about how to maintain social distancing, while necessary, may increase student isolation and justify less embodied, more sterile ways of teaching and learning. Maintaining a commitment to creating a beloved community in which the values of inclusion , justice and anti-bias teaching is difficult when students are or have been instructed on-line and opportunities for connection and community building are sharply diminished. This article explores what educators can do to creatively create and maintain practices that promote embodied learning while also helping students and teachers to be safe. The current moment can either be the “nail in the coffin” for embodied teaching and learning or it can provide critical opportunities to deepen our understanding and commitment to the importance of touch for students and their teachers.