Being there with children: workplace, teacher body and a caring self

Based on an in-depth, qualitative study of toddler teachers in the United States, this article examines relationships between the materiality and the social dimensions of a classroom space as teachers’ workplace that mutually construct everyday work and lends meaning to their professional identities as a caring self. Findings highlight the teachers’ body in the single portable as a specific site of early childhood practice that is grounded in the concept of presence. This article presents teachers’ commitment to a caring self as a legitimated form of capital that they mobilise, in their struggles for social recognition. This article also demonstrates that living a caring presence demands a high level of physical and emotional work that entails regulation of teachers’ bodies. Those demands are more intense when working in space that does not have a separate, private back-stage region where teachers have the opportunity to be offstage.