Compassion in the Early Years Environment - A workshop for early years staff

This workshop will provide an understanding of the ways that early years environments can enable compassion in support of well-being, relationships and development. The workshop will be live scribed throughout to provide attendees with a visual summary of what is covered, that can be kept and shared with others in their settings. The format will be both formative, drawing on an extended piece of research in early childhood education settings, and interactive.

How can compassion support well-being in early years settings?
How do children learn compassion?
What features of early years environments enable it?

Early childhood education environments offer many opportunities for compassion that can support the well-being of children, teachers, families and the wider natural world, as well as children’s learning to live well with others i.e. their development of pro-social and pro-environmental behaviours.

This workshop is about compassion in early childhood education: what it is, how it can be understood in the early years context and how parts of the environment enable compassion and offer opportunities for it to be experienced, explored and extended. The workshop will explain how this works in practice and what comprises a compassion-enabling environment through sharing stories from early years settings. The workshop will be both informative and interactive. Attendees will come away with an expanded view of compassion in ECE and a research-informed approach to enabling compassion in their early years environments – in practice, daily experiences and children’s learning - in support of well-being, relationships, as well as children’s holistic development and living well with others.

Dr Harriet Broadfoot, Career Development Fellow (School of Education) at Durham University and Fellow of the Wolfson Research Institute for Health and Wellbeing

Adults

People working in early childhood education settings, of any level.