ABSTRACT
This chapter explores how early childhood educators have conceptualised children’s experiences during the COVID-19 pandemic, with a focus on both children’s wellbeing and educators’ own wellbeing since the reopening of early childhood services. It interrogates how educators’ constructions of children’s wellbeing and resilience and consequent curricular provisions are influenced by a host of complex factors drawn out by the pandemic. Qualitative research utilised semi-structured interviews with ten participants. Each participant was interviewed three times, at intervals of four months. The three waves of interviews with each of the ten participants were analysed to explore how participants conceptualised children’s wellbeing in conjunction with their own experiences of wellbeing and how these conceptualisations unfolded, as the pandemic became a social phenomenon that extended over a period of time. The data analysis offers important insight into the complexity of educators’ understanding of children’s wellbeing, in light of the challenges they themselves are trying to cope with.
