Iris Murdoch and Early Childhood Education: Enhancing Attention and Moral Vision in Pedagogy (Contesting Early Childhood)

What relevance does the philosophy of Iris Murdoch have to offer to our understanding of early childhood education?In Iris Murdoch and Early Childhood Education, Andrea Delaune establishes the importance of attention, moral imagination, and moral vision for early childhood pedagogy.The book challenges limited behaviouristic or technicist views of education to assert teaching as a richly imaginative undertaking built from the slow and incremental practice of attention. Early childhood teaching can be enriched by Murdoch’s central philosophical question, How can we make ourselves better?, which does not prompt a uniform or hegemonic ideal practice and instead invites us to appreciate the ‘little peering efforts’ of the moral imagination to build a more expansive, comprehensive, and pedagogically impactful approach to educational practice.Drawing extensively on Murdoch’s philosophy, this insightful book provides a hopeful, practical, and accessible vision for change in the everyday pedago