‘I Want to Educate School-Age Children’: producing early childhood teacher professional identities (original) (raw)
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Paper presented at the NZARE annual conference, 2001
This paper draws on interview, journal and observational data collected during 5 qualitative case studies of starting childcare to explore how the teachers constructed their identities as teachers during this event. The case studies involved 5 under-three year old children, their mothers and their teachers in five childcare centres in a major city in New Zealand. Using an approach of "listen [ing] to the teacher's voice" it argues that the teachers constructed their identity with reference to societal and psychological discourses about motherhood and early childhood teaching. These discourses posit the mother's role as primary and that of early childhood teacher/worker as secondary / second best. They also construct early childhood teaching as akin to mothering thus creating tensions and contradictions which in this study affected the way the teachers spoke about their practice and enacted their "theories of practice". This paper argues that early childhood teachers need to reflect on how this positions them in their working relationships with mothers as well as in their role as members of the teaching profession.
Producing and maintaining professional identities in early childhood
Office of Education Research Faculty of Education, 2013
This study is an inquiry into early childhood teacher professional identities. In Australia, workforce reforms in early childhood include major shifts in qualification requirements that call for a university four-year degree-qualified teacher to be employed in child care. This marks a shift in the early years workforce, where previously there was no such requirement. At the same time as these reforms to quality measures are being implemented, and requiring a substantive up skilling of the workforce, there is a growing body of evidence through recent studies that suggests these same four-year degree-qualified early childhood teachers have an aversion to working in child care. Their preferred employment option is to work in the early years of more formal schooling, not in before-school contexts. This collision of agendas warrants investigation. This inquiry is designed to investigate the site at which advocacy for higher qualification requirements meets early childhood teachers who are reluctant to choose child care as a possible career pathway. The key research question for this study is: How are early childhood teachers' professional identities currently produced? The work of this thesis is to problematise the early childhood teacher in child care through a particular method of discourse analysis. There are two sets of data. The first was a key early childhood political document that read as a "moment of arising" (Foucault, 1984a, p. 83). It is a political document which was selected for its current influence on the early childhood field, and in particular, workforce reforms that call for four-year degree-qualified teachers to work in before-school contexts, including child care. The second data set was generated through four focus group discussions conducted with preservice early childhood teachers. The document and transcripts of the focus groups were both analysed as text, as conceptualised by Foucault (1981). Foucault's work spans a number of years and a range of philosophical matters. This thesis draws particularly on Foucault's writings on discourse, power/knowledge, regimes of truth and resistance. In order to consider the production of early childhood teachers' professional identities, the study is also informed by identity theorists, who have worked on gender, performativity and investment (Davies, Producing and Maintaining Professional Identities in Early Childhood iii Producing and Maintaining Professional Identities in Early Childhood v teacher education and challenging dominant ways of speaking child care, and work in child care. This inquiry into early childhood teachers' professional identities has gone some way to exploring the complexities around the early childhood teacher in child care. It is anticipated that the significance of this study will thus have immediate applicably and relevance for the Australian early childhood policy landscape. The early childhood field is in a state of rapid change, and this inquiry has examined some of the disconnects between policy and practice. Awareness of the discourses that are in play in the field will continue to allow space for conversations that challenge dominant assumptions about child care, work in child care and ways of being an early childhood teacher in child care. Producing and Maintaining Professional Identities in Early Childhood vi Publications Gibson, M. (2013, accepted). "I want to educate school age children": Producing early childhood teacher professional identities. Contemporary Issues in Early Childhood, 14(2). Conference Presentations Gibson, M. (2009, November), "When I am a 'qualified' teacher, I want to educate school age children": The rights of children of all ages to qualified teachers. Paper presented at Honoring the Child, Honoring Equity 9, Centre for Equity, Innovation in Early Childhood, University of Melbourne. Gibson, M. (2010, October). Producing and maintaining professional identities in early childhood education and care. Paper presented at the Reconceptualising Early Childhood Education (RECE) Conference, Dalton, USA. Gibson, M. (2012, April). "Love is all you need"… discursive constructions of professional identities in early childhood education and care.
Contemporary Issues in Early Childhood, 2007
Over the last decade teachers, teachers' work and teacher education across all domains of education have been subject to increasing surveillance and regulation. Recent developments in the Australian regulatory context are signalling the emergence of a strengthening bifurcation between prior-to-school and schooling contexts that is forcing a narrowing construction of 'teaching' as work that is only undertaken in schooling contexts. This trend seems likely to have serious implications for the professional identity, status and professional preparation of early childhood teachers and the potential to reposition early childhood contexts as marginalised and non-pedagogical spaces. This article traces some recent developments in teacher regulation and locates an analysis of possible implications for the field of early childhood against a backdrop of emerging trends in the early childhood policy landscape. The emerging tensions invite questions about the potential gains and losses should the current trends become entrenched. The article concludes with a consideration of naming and framing as elements of possible action.
Early Child Development and Care, 2014
This paper presents the findings of a research project investigating the perceptions and expectations held by pre-service teachers regarding the childcare sector. It presents the views of a group of pre-service teachers both before and after their exposure to practice within childcare following a ten week practicum. The personal experiences of the research participants impacted greatly on their evolutionary understanding of and attitude towards the childcare sector. Thematic analysis of the data produced several key concepts that illuminated issues of identity conflict across the care and education divide. This paper makes a necessary contribution to the current research context where research on perspectives of teacher-educators within childcare is limited. It is particularly pertinent in the context of Australia's implementation of the policy requiring a qualified teacher to be employed within childcare settings from 2014 onwards.
Irish Educational Studies, 2010
This paper explores perceptions of professional identity in the early childhood care and educations sector (ECCE) in the Republic of Ireland (ROI). It is concerned with the status, salary and conditions of those working with children aged four to six in preschool and primary school settings. Using qualitative methodology, the study garnered personal perspectives and insights into professional identity. It presents new empirical evidence on the attitudes of those working in ECCE towards their professional identity and their aspirations for the future. Findings indicate that professional identity is contentious and problematic. At preschool level, this is predominantly associated with the lack of a mandatory training requirement. There is compelling evidence that highly trained ECCE graduates are being lost to the sector. At primary school level, while teachers per se enjoy a relatively high social status, their professional identity as infant teachers is compromised within individual school settings. Teachers believe that this is related to a perception that the infant class is akin to 'playschool'. As a result, they do not get the same respect as teachers working in classes higher up the school. These issues gives rise to fundamental questions about the value of early childhood as well as the value placed on those working with four-to six-year-old children in preschool and primary school.
Australasian Journal of Early Childhood, 2012
THE EARLY CHILDHOOD SECTOR HAS in recent times engaged in processes of professionalisation. The expectations associated with engagement in professional relationships is one element of such processes. Another element is an expectation of ethical practice. The paper considers how particular representations of relationships and representations of ethics contribute to the construction of the professional identities of early childhood teachers. Discussion is presented of the ways early childhood teachers experience relationships with parents and colleagues. Possibilities of ‘new’ constructions of professionalism are explored through disruptions to taken-for-granted discursive practices which shape relationships between teachers and parents and between teachers and colleagues. To engage in such disruptions, a theoretical framework of poststructuralism is used to analyse early childhood literature, which works to construct particular identities for early childhood teachers. This analysis i...
Contesting early childhood professional identities: A cross-national discussion
Contemporary Issues in Early Childhood, 2018
In this collective article, the authors explore constructions of early childhood practitioners and how they disconnect and reconnect in a global neo-liberal education policy context. The contributions to the conversation provide windows into shifting professional identities across five national contexts: New Zealand, the USA, Ireland, Australia and Denmark. The authors ask who benefits from the notion of distinct professional identities, linked to early childhood education as locally and culturally embedded practice. They conceptualize teachers’ shifting subjectivities, drawing on Kristeva’s philosophical conception of identity as constantly in construction, open and evolving. Arguments for the urgency to counter the global uniformity machine, streamlined curricula, standardized assessment and deprofessionalization are not new. However, the authors wonder whether these arguments are missing something. Does our localized and highly contextualized identity construction enable ‘divide ...
2020
Problematic policy constructions of the purpose of education implicate professional identities and working conditions of professionals working with the youngest children. This paper builds on our earlier writing, to contest teacher professional identities in Australia, Ireland, Denmark and the United States of America, to illustrate the crucial importance of contextualised policy landscapes in early childhood education and care. It uses prevailing policy constructions, power imbalances and tensions in defining teacher identities, to ask crucial questions, such as what has become of the professional ‘self’. It questions the fundamental ethics of care and encounter, and of worthy wage and other campaigns focused on the well-being of teachers when faced with a world-wide crisis. The cross-national conversations culminate in a contemporary confrontation of teacher identity and imperatives in increasingly uncertain times as evolving in light of the COVID-19 pandemic.
2012
Early childhood teachers spend their professional lives in social interactions with children, families and colleagues. Social interactions shape how people understand themselves and each other through discourses. Teachers in Aotearoa New Zealand negotiate their subjectivities, or self-understandings, within initial teacher education (ITE), professional expectations, education and society. They are shaped by historical and contemporary discourses of early childhood teaching professionalism as they gain status as qualified and registered teachers. Early childhood teachers' understandings of their personal professional identities influence self-understandings of everyone they encounter professionally, especially young children. This poststructural qualitative collective case study investigates five newly-qualified early childhood teachers' negotiations of their personal professional identities. My research study is based in postmodern understandings of identities as multiple, c...