Abstract
Teaching in general and teaching young children in particular are wrought with complexities and ambiguities. Across various and sometimes competing points of view, multiple stakeholders (i.e. policymakers, external experts, managerial regulators) promote improving the quality of early education, with an integral part of that being teacher professionalization. What is often overlooked in stakeholders’ zealous efforts to allegedly advance the profession and improve young children’s education and care is the complexity of teachers’ daily practices and the diverse bases of professional knowledge. Yet current policy trends promulgate simplistically narrow appraisals of teachers’ work with correspondingly heavy-handed directives. On such grounds, scholars have offered advice for “re-claiming” the profession (Hatch, 2015) or “professionalizing” the workforce (Washington and Gadson, 2017). On the one hand, there is reason to question whether notions of “re-claiming” the profession imply nostalgia for a past that never was. On the other hand, arguments to professionalize teachers of young children in a unifying way are complicated by the diverse philosophical, cultural, sociopolitical, and geographic particularities of the individuals and contexts that constitute the present field. Teaching young children with a commitment to the rights of each child and devotion to cultivating freedom, agency, and well-being, as advanced by scholars such as Urban (2010) and Buzzelli (2015), requires early childhood practitioners to navigate challenging institutional terrains.
Considering the prominence of the global educational reform movement (Sahlberg, 2015), and education professional organizations such as the National Association for the Education of Young Children and Council for the Accreditation of Educator Preparation, careful analysis of how early childhood professionalism is being framed and advanced is warranted. The predominant neo-liberal tenor, propagated by global educational reform, promotes a measurable, linear, and systematized structure regarding the knowledge and values expected of early childhood professionals. Presumptive universalisms and prescriptive mandates impose images of professionalism that overlook the particularities of individuals’ lives and contexts. As such, a semi-professional, compliance-based role is often ascribed to early childhood educators. This emphasis on ways of being or processes of becoming a teacher invites a consideration of ontological and ethical dimensions of early childhood practice. Across diverse perspectives, building the professional capacity of early childhood practitioners is deemed of vital importance amongst policymakers, scholars, and practitioners. However, assertions of what constitutes the professional capacities that must be cultivated are as innumerable as the problems posed, questions raised, and aims stated regarding early childhood practices. Despite the plurality of voices and appreciation of the complexity of teaching young children, which has been embraced for decades by reconceptualizers of early childhood education, hegemonic monologues of reductionist evaluative frameworks routinely appraise and manage the daily lives of practitioners.
This themed issue brings together international and critical perspectives surrounding ideas on the lived experiences of early childhood practitioners, addressing matters of identity, discourse, power, and ethical commitment as a way to contest the dominant, standards-based, managerial approaches. Appreciating the multiple, complex, sometimes competing, and value-laden points of view that can be taken up to address these topics, this issue strives to reconceptualize dominant notions of what it means to be an early childhood “professional.” The first article illuminates a global picture of these challenges in “Contesting early childhood professional identities” (Arndt, Urban, Murray, Smith, Swadener, and Ellegaard). Supporting the contesting of professional identities, the next three articles delve directly into the identity work of early childhood teachers: men in early childhood (Wright), pre-service teachers (Gaches and Walli), and in-service teachers (Sisson). The next three articles critically examine the influence that common assessment and evaluation practices have on the lived experiences of early childhood educators. Reconsidering assessment and evaluation in early childhood education, the subsequent articles outline evaluation as a moral practice (Buzzelli); highlight what is overlooked as a consequence of standardized evaluations of teacher quality (Delaney); and narrate early childhood educators’ expressions of professionalism through radical and nomadic non-compliance (Leafgren).
This issue also features two provocative colloquiums that may warrant special issues given their keen insights into power aspects related to becoming an early childhood professional. Power infused into issues of intersectionality—race, gender, dis/ability—is foregrounded (Black) and the power of privilege surfaces as minority-world pre-service teachers learn in majority-world settings (Madrid Akpovo and Nganga).
Arndt, Urban, Murray, Smith, Swadener, and Ellegaard open the issue with an international conversation. Across five national contexts, they conceptualize professional identities as constantly and continuously being under construction. In this way, the authors avoid reducing early childhood educators’ professionalism to static images. An early childhood educator’s professional identity is instead conceptualized as an emerging and evolving process of becoming, instead of a procedural adherence to a fixed set of norms discerning what early childhood professionals once were or ought to become. Moreover, Arendt and her colleagues encourage us to reconceptualize connectedness while embracing multiple, diverse, and local meanings derived from New Zealand, the USA, Ireland, Australia, and Denmark. With careful attention to subjective and contextual matters, this article opens the special issue with a call for solidarity, suggesting that early childhood professionals have much in common that ties us together.
Travis Wright’s autoethnography, “Contesting hegemony: Re-imagining masculinities for early childhood education,” reflects an investigation to deepen understandings of the social and psychological experiences of men caring for and teaching young children. He defines, explores, and challenges hegemonic masculinity in society and specifically men’s work in the early childhood classroom. Powerful stories from Wright’s personal practice as an urban early childhood educator, licensed professional counselor, university-based researcher, and White gay male strengthen his argument for reappropriating masculinity to a praxis of caring. Critical analysis and awareness of his own and others’ interpretations of socially sanctioned and uncontested hegemonic practices allowed Wright to identify the internalization and persistence of the hegemonic experiences. Wright encourages the field of early childhood education to disrupt the internalized masculine hegemony and re-imagine the possibilities of men—in all of their variousness and masculinities—teaching in the early years and, in so doing, create societal transformation.
Sonya Gaches and Shelina Walli’s article, “‘My mom says you’re not really a teacher’: Rhizomatic explorations of ever-shifting student teacher identities and experiences,” examines student teachers’ professional identity work. Gaches and Walli recognize the identity of pre-service teachers as university students in coursework and as teachers during practicums. By considering linear and non-linear ways of becoming and identifying as a “teacher,” they challenge and rupture neo-liberal truths of professional identity. Their work illustrates the “ever-evolving, messy, multilayered, multifaceted, and never fixed or finished” process of being and becoming a “teacher.”
Jamie Sisson’s “Preschool teachers as undercover agents within the figured world of public school” explores five public preschool teachers’ professional identity struggles in a dominant managerial system that categorized teachers as technicians and service providers. Sisson’s cultural and narrative perspectives shed light on teachers’ roles and desires in view of their career experiences, education, and professional identities as contrasted with this oppressive system. The findings show that the teachers’ improvisations of curriculum, pedagogy, rules, and relationships were part of the subversive teaching strategies for them to have an active role within the competing discourses of what it means to be a teacher.
With concern about the increased use of standardized assessments in early childhood settings, Cary Buzzelli challenges a dominant discourse that frames educational assessment and evaluation as mere technical endeavors. Applying Amartya Sen’s capabilities approach to development as well as Thomas Schwandt’s practical hermeneutic approach to evaluation, Buzzelli reconceptualizes evaluation and assessment in a manner where early childhood educators’ personal, private values and beliefs are not overwhelmed by institutionally imposed codes of professional ethics. Moreover, this liberating vision for activating the moral dimension of assessment emphasizes appraisals of children’s agency and opportunities to learn afforded within the classroom, instead of a narrower focus on the achievement of obligatory standardized outcomes.
Two articles follow with careful empirical examinations of the influence that teacher evaluation systems have on early childhood teachers’ attention. Katherine Delaney turns our attention to the bearing that standardized quality metrics have on preschool teachers’ daily practices. Noting that accountability policies have bolstered the use of quality metrics in early childhood settings, Delaney focuses specifically on Head Start. One measure—Pianta et al.’s (2008) Pre-K Classroom Assessment Scoring System (Pre-K CLASS)—has become dominant in defining quality in Head Start classrooms. Through three vignettes, she highlights the key problems with a unified version of quality. The first two vignettes illustrate how attending to the version of quality promoted by Pre-K CLASS led hardworking professionals to overlook children’s undirected learning experiences and devalue peer interactions in favor of exchanges dominated by adults. The third works to critically unpack the way that the high stakes associated with this quality metric enforce a constraining version of quality through inescapable surveillance. Taking up comic subjectivity theory, Delaney argues that in many ways high-stakes quality measures deprofessionalize teachers of young children by demanding compliance against their better judgment, all the while rendering invisible the rich, meaningful, high-quality experiences already occurring in classrooms.
In the final article, Sheri Leafgren calls for disobedient professionals. Finding the compliance demanded of pre-service and practicing teachers more petty and tiresome than helpful, she contests the power and control formally articulated by the Professional Standards Council and often reinforced by teacher education programs and collegial relationships. As an alternative to succumbing to the pressures to live in obedience to the established norms of the field, Leafgren radically re-imagines and illustrates examples of nomadic professionalism. Becoming a professional, she concludes, is an ongoing process of being willing to challenge and disrupt the striations of power and authority, maintaining an openness to the possibility for not-yet-realized possibilities.
Samara Madrid Akpovo and Lydiah Nganga’s colloquium is titled “Minority-world professionals in majority-world early childhood contexts: How do international field experiences promote intercultural competence or reinforce ‘professional’ ethnocentrism?” This colloquium challenges how and why Euro-Western teacher education programs provide pre-service and in-service teachers with international field experiences. In doing so, these scholars interrogate how these experiences construct intercultural competence or reinforce ethnocentrism for the early childhood novice.
The colloquium “Providing quality early childhood professional development at the intersections of power, race, gender, and dis/ability” is written by Felicia Black. Utilizing post-structuralism perspectives and Black feminist thought, Black shares a study on a US childcare center’s professional development for part-time childcare workers who have limited experience and training. Through this process, she uncovers a structure riddled with power, gender, race, and dis/ability issues that stimulate several questions of how to truly support this large segment of the childcare workforce.
The special issue concludes with Claudia Diaz’s review of Melissa M Jozwiak, Betsy J Cahill, and Rachel Theilheimer’s Continuity in Children’s Worlds: Choices and Consequences for Early Childhood Settings (2016).