Towards an Ecology of Relations: Reconceptualising Relational Pedagogy in Early Childhood Education and Care

Relational pedagogy has shifted educational focus from knowledge transmission to cultivating relational conditions for learning, foregrounding responsiveness, recognition, and democratic participation. In early childhood education and care (ECEC), however, “the relational” remains predominately anchored in the educator–child dyad, narrowing what becomes visible as pedagogy and obscuring the relational complexity of everyday life in ECEC settings. This conceptual article reconceptualises relational pedagogy in ECEC as an ecology of relations and brings four often-marginalised domains into view: children’s self-relations, child–parent relations, peer relations, and more-than-human relations. Together with child–educator relations, these five relational domains are framed as interdependent and mutually shaping, such that shifts or ruptures in one domain reverberate across the others. Drawing together relational pedagogy scholarship, curriculum framings, and critiques of neoliberal market-accountability governance, this article shows how dyadic and metric-driven logics can position these wider relations as pedagogically secondary or render them invisible. An ecology-of-relations framing offers conceptual language for recognising, researching, and defending relational flourishing in ECEC, and for redirecting attention toward how ecological relations are made possible, sustained, and reshaped in ECEC contexts.