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Making sensitive pedagogic relationships in the nursery is a deeply human activity evoking joy and satisfaction, but stress and uncertainty too. From an international perspective, strong local reflective spaces are required if early childhood provision is to be culturally and context responsive, counter-balancing globalising pressure to standardise provision. Further, nursery practitioners are entitled to a formal space where their subjective experience of the work, its demands and dilemma, can be expressed and understood. This paper is about 'Work Discussion' (WD) as such a reflective space. Professional reflection is now included in early years policy frameworks internationally for the reasons above. WD, distinctive in including explicit attention to emotion in pedagogy, is one model of a reflective space. This paper arises from a longitudinal evaluation of WD in nursery funded by the Froebel Trust. The methodology of the evaluation and the positive findings of impact for children have already been published. The aim of this paper is to theorise WD, drawing on the work of Wilfried Bion, a psychoanalyst and theorist of thinking in groups. Empirical data if offered to illustrate the explanatory power of Bion's theory including what may be discussed openly and what is avoided in pedagogic reflection.

The significance of practitioners' emotions in nursery interactions is evident in vivid accounts from widely different socio-cultural contexts. Work Discussion (WD) is a model of professional reflection distinctive in its attention to emotion in work interactions. Psychoanalytic conceptions, particularly the notion of the defended subject, underpin WD. Enabling participants in WD to discuss subjective work experience in an open way is thus subtle and sensitive. Research has not addressed how the impact of different models of professional reflection may be evaluated. Can WD, with its explicit attention to the emotions evoked at work, strengthen practitioners' engagement with children and families? This paper critically discusses the complex methodological issues in evaluating the impact of WD on nursery practitioners, children and parents in the nursery. The challenge is to combine the intense subjectivity of WD with an evaluation that is rigorous and objective. Later papers will illustrate data analysis and report findings.

Nursery experience is now common for young children and their families. Questions of quality have focussed mainly on safety and early learning. The roles of subtle emotional processes in daily pedagogic interactions have received surprisingly little attention. This paper discusses the Tavistock Observation Method (TOM), a naturalistic method of observation underpinned by psychoanalytic conceptions and in which emotional experience is an integral part of observation narratives. The paper reports on a detailed evaluation of the use of an adapted version of TOM in nurseries in England and the contribution it can make to empirical exploration of emotional processes. A concurrent sister study will report on the use of A-TOM in Australia.

This article argues for a turn in early years policy towards more serious attention to the emotional dimensions of nursery organisation and practice. The article describes three developing bodies of research on emotion in nursery, each taking a different theoretical perspective. The central argument of the article is that these three bodies of research converge in their findings on the importance of staff feeling cared about and understood in enabling staff to more effective in thinking about and responding to the individual children with whom they work. The article illustrates how emotion might be taken more seriously through reference to a number of developing practical initiatives arising from these bodies of work.

The last 30 years have seen a significant increase in babies attending nursery, with corresponding questions about the aims and organisation of practice. Research broadly agrees on the importance of emotionally consistent, sensitive and responsive interactions between staff and babies. Policy objectives for nursery and expectations of parents and staff give rise to different and sometimes conflicting aims for such interactions; for example attachments to staff, peer interactions or early learning. Research shows marked variations of pedagogy aims and organisation with babies in nurseries in different national and cultural contexts. It also demonstrates variation between nurseries in similar contexts and between staff in their beliefs and values about work with babies. This paper reports on an exploratory study of the beliefs, aspirations and approaches of eight managers concerning pedagogy with babies in two similar English local authorities. These managers spoke of the importance of being responsive to the concerns and priorities of parents, whilst being sensitive to the demands of the work on their staff. The main finding was of the contradictions and confusions managers felt were inherent in the work, arising from both conflicting policy objectives and personal beliefs and aspirations; sometimes their own and sometimes those of individual staff and parents. Urban, Vandenbroeck, Van Laere, Lazzari, and Peeters' [(2012). Towards competent systems in early childhood education and care. Implications for policy and practice. "European Journal of Education," 47(4), 508-526.] concept of the "competent system" is used to recommend a grounded approach to the development of a more culturally, socially and individually responsive pedagogy with babies than appears to exist at present.

In a single intensive nursery case study, using in depth interviews, group discussion and self completed daily diaries, this article reports on staff accounts of the emotional aspects of their interactions with young children. The findings show how much the staff achieved through their empathy for children and families and the establishment of warm, responsive and individual relationships. However, they also reveal how vulnerable these interactions were to discontinuity and disturbance and how much the work was based on an intuitive approach. There was little specification about nursery attachments in theoretical or practical terms to guide staff critical reflection and judgement about managing these close relationships. The findings also indicate the emotional demands on staff of sustaining such emotionally close interactions with very young children. The article concludes acknowledging the logistical and emotional complexity of facilitating consistent, accountable and reflective attachment interactions with young children. It highlights the importance of developing sophisticated management attention to the emotional experience of attachment based pedagogy so that feelings evoked in staff by attachment work can be better understood.

The importance of attention to children's emotions has been emphasised widely in early care and education research and policy. Enabling such attention has been seen as achieved primarily through attachment interactions with nursery staff. However, there is increasing awareness that facilitating such interactions in a way that is optimal for children depends in part on staff's critical professional reflection about how these interactions are managed with children, with family members and between staff themselves. Such professional reflection is seen as needing to include attention to the emotional experience of staff as well as children. This paper reports on Work Discussion as a model of professional reflection that is attentive to emotional experience as it is evoked in professional work. Work Discussion and its theoretical underpinning, a psychoanalytic view of organisational ethos and interaction, is introduced and explained. The paper then reports on a Work Discussion group with nine nursery managers, the issues brought for discussion, the managers' reports of their experience of the group, and the value of Work Discussion in helping them think about and manage interactions in their nurseries.

Despite official endorsement of attachment principles in nursery work, these are often not translated into nursery practice. One possible reason for this is that staff training does not sufficiently address the personal implications and anxieties that children's attachments may entail for practitioners. Working from a psychoanalytic perspective on organizational functioning and group learning, this paper describes action research with a group of nursery heads who participated in a professional development program designed specifically to explore emotional experience in professional work. The positive evaluations of the program by heads and their staff are described including examples of experiential learning and of increased staff awareness about, and responsiveness to, the emotional experience of children. However, the research also concluded that sustained effectiveness of the model is likely to be dependent on an ongoing culture of attention to the emotional experience of nursery staff within nursery umbrella organizations.

Anxiety about the emotional experience of young children in nursery has been central in thinking about the development of nursery provision. The main theory of emotion that has been applied to nursery practice has been attachment theory. This article proposes that there is a need to open up our conceptual framework for thinking about emotional interactions in nursery and introduces concepts from psychoanalytic theory that may assist in this. It illustrates the application of these concepts to thinking about nursery tasks and interactions by reference to existing studies of nursery provision.

Communities in the UK are seeing a sustained shift in the balance of care of babies and the youngest children from families to nurseries, with a particular emphasis being placed on early learning. Yet a basic question of whether nurseries should be modelled on the intimacy and spontaneity of family interactions or the more professional and planned interactions of school has remained largely unaddressed. The assumption has been that the multiple tasks now expected of nursery, including education, child care, health promotion, family support and child protection, can be integrated together, and much attention has been given to this. Much less attention has been given to the way different staff respond to these different conceptions of roles and tasks and how they interact with the personal and professional priorities and concerns of the staff themselves. Using the conceptual framework of "primary task" taken from the organization studies literature, the article explores the interplay of these different and competing tasks through an intensive nursery case study. The article concludes that recognition and understanding of both professional and personal tasks and how they align or conflict is important to our understanding of the behaviours and responses of children and adults in the nursery system. (Contains 4 tables.)

Whilst there is broad consensus that the emotional responsiveness and sensitivity of staff are of high importance in interactions with babies and young children in nursery, there is not consensus about how far interactions should be organised to facilitate attachments with particular staff. This paper brings the "child's voice" into this debate by introducing a method of observation that is particularly suited to the observation of children's emotional responses. Data from observations of two children, aged 12 and 16 months, attending two different nurseries are presented to illustrate the observation method. The paper concludes that this data can be interpreted to show the significance to each of these children of attachment relationships with adults but also the power of group relations in supporting children's emotional well being. (Contains 1 table.)

Advocates an approach to observation of young children in nurseries that takes into account the emotional and cognitive domains of observer and the observer in communication with the entire nursery system. Notes that in this approach, observation becomes a source of reflection that involves psychological and pedagogical states of uncertainty and requires ability to tolerate the associated anxiety. (LBT)