Between the Sweeping and the Wiping: The Invisible Labor and Relational Care of Early Childhood Educators

Abstract

This essay examines the invisible emotional labor embedded in early childhood education through the author’s experience as an Iraqi American preschool teacher traveling between Iraq and the United States. Drawing on ethnographic observation and personal narrative, the analysis argues that early childhood systems operate through a hidden curriculum in two directions: teaching children whose ways of being “belong,” according to narrow dominant norms, while simultaneously depending on the invisible and unacknowledged labor of teachers who absorb what the institution refuses to see. Encounters with two preschool teachers, Maryam in Iraq and Chongi in the United States, reveal a shared pattern across contexts. Standardized systems cannot encompass what children carry, leaving teachers to bridge the gap through their own histories, grief, and humanity. Grounded in the work of Noddings (1984), Anzaldúa (1987), and Mills (1997), this essay calls for policies that name, protect, and compensate this labor as central to teaching.