Speaking with Compassion: Linguistic Analysis of Teachers' Descriptions of Challenging Behavior

Young children are being expelled from preschool classrooms across the U.S at a distressing rate, and those removed are disproportionately boys and Black children. Current research is limited in both its explanation of what leads teachers to seek a child's expulsion and in a rigorous methodological approach to capture and understand this multi-leveled process. Still, recent research suggests that teachers' own emotional capacities, their perception of children, and access to resources for supporting children's social-emotional learning could play roles in the expulsion process. The present study extends this work by linguistically analyzing teachers' use of compassionate language when discussing specific children's challenging behavior and national trends in discipline disparities. Textual analysis is combined with teachers' self-reported history of expulsion requests and access to program-level resources and supports to support children's social-emotional development to assess associations between compassion, context, and discipline. Findings can support the development of teacher-level interventions and resources to prevent expulsion.