Vanello, Daniel;
(2025)
Rethinking emotional development in the early years curriculum.
Education 3-13
10.1080/03004279.2025.2510700.
(In press).
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Abstract
Early childhood education researchers have recently expressed the need to improve our understanding of children’s emotional development in order to respond to challenges faced by early years teachers and educational policymakers. Starting with calls for improvement targeting the conception of emotional development at play in the English national early years curriculum (EYFS), the aim of this paper is to argue for a framework of early years emotional development that goes beyond these critiques and that can inform early years curricula across nations. The paper does so by appealing to a philosophical tradition emphasising a universal aspect of emotional development. According to this philosophical tradition, emotions are psychological responses open to rational assessment and justification in virtue of being responses to things we value. The framework therefore conceives children’s emotional capacities not as blind reactions to what they experience but rather as shaped by cognitive and rational abilities to understand, evaluate and make sense of the world around them. The upshot is a framework that emphasises children’s rational agency in their emotional development and that stresses the importance of scaffolding children’s emotional development throughout their education and not simply in the early years.
| Type: | Article |
|---|---|
| Title: | Rethinking emotional development in the early years curriculum |
| Open access status: | An open access version is available from UCL Discovery |
| DOI: | 10.1080/03004279.2025.2510700 |
| Publisher version: | https://doi.org/10.1080/03004279.2025.2510700 |
| Language: | English |
| Additional information: | © 2025 The Author(s). Published by Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/), which permits non-commercial re-use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited, and is not altered, transformed, or built upon in any way. The terms on which this article has been published allow the posting of the Accepted Manuscript in a repository by the author(s) or with their consent. |
| Keywords: | Emotional development, early years curriculum, philosophy of value, neo-sentimentalism, teacher training |
| UCL classification: | UCL UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > School of Education UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > School of Education > UCL Institute of Education UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > School of Education > UCL Institute of Education > IOE - Education, Practice and Society |
| URI: | https://discovery.ucl.ac.uk/id/eprint/10209276 |
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