Feeling like ‘the ham of the sandwich’: The contested professional identities of school-based early childhood educators in Chile

Abstract

Present-day early childhood educators face the challenge of producing their professional identities in highly neo-liberal contexts, negotiating contested discourses on professionalism, education quality and the overall purpose of early childhood education. While it has been suggested by critical scholarship that the early childhood workforce responds to these challenges by developing a unified professional identity, the author contends that particular contexts of practice (such as schools) and the schoolification of early childhood education may produce fragmentation within the workforce. This is crystallised in the figure of the school-based early childhood educator, whose professional practice lies somewhere between that of a kindergarten educator and a schoolteacher. As school-based early childhood education is not perceived as proper early childhood practice by kindergarten educators, school-based educators struggle to identify with this group of practitioners. Drawing on a psychoanalytically informed qualitative study with early childhood educators, the author discusses some of these tensions and proposes the notion of liminal identity (an intermediate space of becoming where identities – among other possibilities – may be examined and reimagined) as a starting point for the exploration of this emergent type of professional subjectivity in the context of an increasing provision of early childhood education in school settings. The author calls for a destabilisation of oversimplified understandings of the relation between educators and their contexts of practice, and the acknowledgement that educators experience and respond to the struggles of the profession in diverse and complex ways.

Introduction

In this article, I foreground some of the multiple aspects at play in the production of the professional identities of early childhood educators, with a focus on how particular contexts of practice may shape these identities. Specifically, I consider some of the challenges that school-based and kindergarten-based early childhood education (ECE) poses to the formation of these identities. In my doctoral study on the intersubjective and unconscious aspects of the professional identities of Chilean early childhood educators, I found that these professionals identified a clear tension between school-based and kindergarten-based early childhood practice. Particularly, they suggested that kindergartens provide better ECE, while schools would be an adverse and undesirable context for professional practice. This self-affirming discourse of kindergarten as the pre-eminent provider of ECE may seem to support particular claims in critical early childhood scholarship – notably, the claim that the early childhood workforce responds to the struggles of the profession – in this case, the challenges of practising in schools – by developing a self-assertive, shared professional identity. However, I argue that such discourses on the primacy of kindergarten may, in fact, fracture this professional identity by excluding school-based educators. In order to advance this argument, in the following section I give a succinct account of some key aspects of the international debate on early childhood professional identities, with a focus on schoolification and the Chilean context. Then, in the ‘Findings’ section, I illustrate the way the early childhood educators in my study characterised some of the perceived differences between schools and kindergartens, and how they drew on apparently contradictory discourses within ECE to construct a position of resistance in relation to the hegemonising effect of schools – most notably, against schoolification. Lastly, I discuss how this cohesive resistance seems to be destabilised in the figure of the school-based early childhood educator, whose adherence to the ECE ethos is ultimately questioned. The findings presented in this article problematise suggestions in the literature about educators developing a shared professional identity as a product of a fairly homogeneous experience of belonging to the early childhood workforce.

The international debate

Neo-liberalism, quality discourses and professional identities

In the strongly neo-liberal and high-accountability contexts of present-day educational systems, the pedagogical practice of early childhood educators is characterised by a constant negotiation of discourses of quality, professionalism and professional identity. Quality has become a highly instrumental neo-liberal narrative (Ball, 2003; Dahlberg and Moss, 2004; Rose, 1999), according to which it is possible to obtain great profit from the social investment made in ECE while advancing human development and ultimately achieving social justice (Chalke, 2013; Moss, 2006; Urban, 2008). Within this discourse, there is an intense focus on educational outcomes, along with an evidence-based approach to the implementation of what works, with no concern for the assumptions, meanings and values that underlie the adoption of a particular position on quality (Moss, 2016; Urban, 2008). Rose (1999, Moss, 2016: 10) argues that the discourse of quality exemplifies a human technology that shapes behaviours in the hope of producing certain desired effects while preventing undesired ones. It is a technology of normalisation, as it sets norms against which performance can be assessed; a technology of distance, which assumes that individuals’ performance can be compared regardless of its context; and a technology of regulation, which offers a powerful management tool to govern at a distance. ECE scholars working with a Foucauldian perspective (Bradbury, 2012; Bradbury and Roberts-Holmes, 2017; Osgood, 2006a, 2006b; Walkerdine, 2003) agree with this observation, pointing out how neo-liberal technologies ultimately discipline early childhood practitioners’ own understandings of what it means to be a good educator (Poblete, 2020; Viviani, 2016). In relation to this, Ball (2003) observes how, in neo-liberal systems, teachers are subject to control and regulation through monitoring systems and the production of information. These mechanisms stimulate the development of technologies of performativity, through which an individual’s performance becomes the measure of their productivity and, ultimately, their quality or worth (Ball, 2003: 216). These are the educational systems that the early childhood workforce has endured in recent decades, given their attributed role as ‘implementers’ of such stringent educational goals.

There is a wide consensus on the interconnectedness and crucial importance of both care and education – what has been termed ‘educare’ (Caldwell, 1989) – in the early childhood profession (Harwood et al., 2013; Manning-Morton, 2006; Page, 2017; Rosen, 2019; Taggart, 2011), and an increasing understanding of ECE as an emotional and relational practice (Dalli, 2011; Moss, 2006; Moyles, 2001; Osgood, 2010; Urban, 2008; Warren, 2014). However, these key attributes of the profession have been societally perceived as unprofessional in contrast to traditional understandings of professionalism, which are often concerned with asserting rigid professional boundaries among disciplines by exerting a knowledge monopoly and control over who may practise (Moss, 2006: 38). In this way, the boundary-crossing character of early childhood practice, situated at the intersection of teaching and care (Manning-Morton, 2006), is often deemed unprofessional, building on a spurious dichotomy between education and care (Dahlberg and Moss, 2004), and the associated conflation of education and professionalism, and care and unprofessionalism. In terms of educators’ experience of these tensions, it has been pointed out that they are faced with an impossible predicament (Chalke, 2013; Pupala et al., 2016; Taggart, 2011; Vincent and Braun, 2011), where they are expected to comply with understandings of quality constructed around norms and regulations while autonomously exercising professional judgement, which is widely understood as a key attribute of professionalism. In relation to this, while early childhood educators have been described as stressed and frustrated about the surveillance to which they are subject, they also seem to play along with it, using norms and standards to validate and legitimise their practice (Pupala et al., 2016: 663).

Critical scholarship in ECE has highlighted the pressing need to transcend the non-professional–professional divide (Dalli, 2011; Moss, 2006) by advancing alternative frameworks, such as that of ‘relational professionalism’ (Manning-Morton, 2006; Osgood, 2010, 2012; Urban, 2008; Warren, 2014), in order to acknowledge the criticality of relationships to early childhood practice. Regarding the identitary effects of the professionalism debate, while there is awareness among authors of the fragmentation of the early childhood workforce – given the structural disparities in the professional backgrounds and status of educators – there is an ongoing discussion around the fact that early childhood educators may have a somewhat uniform experience of belonging to the workforce in terms of the professional identities they embody and how the profession is perceived. For example, Osgood (2006b: 196) argues that, despite the many differences and peculiarities throughout early childhood provision, the workforce shares a common set of values and experiences the effects of policy in similar ways. Furthermore, as an ethic of care and emotional labour are pivotal to educators’ understanding of themselves, they would offer the starting point to pose a feminist ‘professionalism from within’ that is infused with confidence, pride and self-belief (Osgood, 2006b: 193–194). In agreement, Chang-Kredl and Kingsley (2014) point out how the perception of a shared contribution to society may give the early childhood workforce a sense of resilience.

Whilst the literature on early childhood educator identities acknowledges the diverse contexts in which educators negotiate their identities within discourses on qualifications, professionalism and care values (Warren, 2014), some potentially conflicting positions can be observed – notably, the acknowledgement that there is not one single early childhood educator identity (Fairchild, 2017); what seems to be idealised views on what these identities should look like; and a desire to contribute to forging a strong unified workforce identity. For instance, Ortlipp et al. (2011) seem to provide a definition of professional identity as experienced by the workforce as a whole, and even to suggest that a unified professional identity would be desirable. Similarly, normative aspects emerge when discussing teacher professional identities, as seen in Melasalmi and Husu’s (2018: 104) suggestion that there actually is such thing as a successful professional identity formation process. For Osgood (2006b), a shared collective identity may offer resistance to policy imposition and, ultimately, be a means to emancipation. In sum, it can be argued that what the literature finds diverse is the conditions of the production of early childhood educator identities, especially regarding educators’ working conditions, yet the aim seemingly is to produce a particular kind of educator who shares a specific vision of what the struggles of the workforce are. In the analysis in the ‘Findings and discussion’ section of this article, I discuss empirical data that may defy some of these claims.

The schoolification of early childhood education

One of the most impactful effects of neo-liberal discourses on quality in ECE is schoolification, the global trend whereby, in preparing children for primary school – that is, helping them to achieve school readiness – pre-primary settings are required to implement a prescribed curriculum and focus on the development of children’s academic skills, consequently underplaying early childhood curricula and pedagogy (Brooks and Murray, 2016). In relation to this, the neo-liberal agenda in ECE, among other instrumental goals, aims to produce future citizens who will develop the knowledge, skills and competencies to navigate and further contribute to a globalised world (Duhn, 2014). A schoolifying focus on early literacy and numeracy, to the detriment of the socio-emotional and well-being aspects of ECE, often privileges instructional methods that de-emphasise the play-based approach that is largely characteristic of early childhood curricula (Pardo and Opazo, 2019: 68). Historically, European curricula have adopted a play-based, holistic approach, with a focus on child-initiated activities (Sylva et al., 2015, in Shuey et al., 2019); this has especially been the case in Nordic countries. However, in recent years, this emphasis has started to be replaced by more highly structured learning activities and a strong focus on language acquisition and standardised assessment (Karila, 2012: 587). For example, in 2014, Norway introduced a language evaluation – the ‘Early registration of language development’ (Gunnarsdottir, 2014: 242) – while the Finnish and Swedish curricula now include child and family assessments (Karila, 2012). In recent decades, countries like England (Moss, 2002), New Zealand (Alcock and Haggerty, 2013), Iceland (Gunnarsdottir, 2014) and Denmark (Pardo and Opazo, 2019) have started to adopt a similar schoolifying approach to the curriculum.

Ang (2014) has pointed out how schoolification is often perpetuated by parents themselves; this is especially the case in countries such as England and Hong Kong, and South East Asian countries like Singapore. In the latter, for example, it is increasingly common for very young children (three- to four-year-olds) to attend two preschools in order to increase their preparation for school. Similarly, there are reports in the UK of children as young as two being tutored to prepare them for admission tests, in order to secure a place in highly selective schools (Ang, 2014: 186). This is a neo-liberal effect that places excessive demands on very young children. At the same time, in the last decade, resisting voices have emerged that aim to defy the trend of school readiness. An example of this is the Too Much Too Soon (2013) campaign in England, which, bringing together educators, parents and academics, advocates for a reprioritisation of play as the fundamental learning tool in ECE. Lastly, in relation to this article’s focus on school-based ECE, it has been observed that early childhood programmes that are delivered in school settings are especially prone to schoolification, as the demands of the school level often subjugate the aims of ECE (Brooks and Murray, 2016).

The Chilean context

There is growing concern, both in Chile and internationally, over the increasing provision of ECE within the school system (Pardo and Woodrow, 2014). In line with the international literature, the Chilean case offers an example of how school functioning tends to colonise the early childhood level; there are tensions between schoolifying practices (e.g. adult-led activities, instructional teaching and a focus on learning outcomes) and those practices more characteristic of ECE, like a children-centred, holistic and play-based approach that adapts to children’s pace of learning (Grau-Cárdenas et al., 2018; Jadue, 2014). While the Chilean early childhood curriculum (Chilean Ministry of Education, 2018) endorses a play-based pedagogy, the Chilean educational system does not oversee early childhood curriculum implementation; hence, early childhood settings are ultimately free to adopt their own pedagogical emphases. Against this backdrop, early childhood educators who practise in Chilean schools have resisted the schoolifying tendency of their contexts of practice, in spite of often having a limited capacity to perform this resistance beyond the sphere of the classroom (Pardo and Opazo, 2019).

Since 2019, the ‘Equity in Early Childhood Education’ bill (also known as the ‘Middle Levels Funding’ bill) has been under debate in the Chilean parliament. This bill claims to aim to reduce the disparity between state-funded and privately subsidised early childhood settings by funding middle-level places (for children aged two to three) offered by privately subsidised providers. It bears noting that privately subsidised kindergartens in Chile receive fewer resources than state-funded settings. In order to receive funding, the settings must have been awarded ‘Official Recognition’, which establishes requirements regarding staff qualifications, adult-to-child ratios, infrastructure and didactic materials, but does not include any criteria specifically relevant to early childhood settings. By 2020, only 78 kindergartens throughout the country had achieved this status (Subsecretaría de Educación Parvularia, 2020), while thousands of kindergartens required intervention to become eligible. Conversely, as privately subsidised schools already have ‘Official Recognition’ (which is mandatory for all schools), it makes them the only settings that are currently able to provide middle-level places in compliance with the regulations. Such indirectly targeted financial incentives, among other effects, may potentially stimulate competition and the concomitant creation of a ‘kindergarten market’ among schools, further escalating the schoolification of ECE. Another much-disputed aspect of the bill concerns its notion of ‘voluntary contributions’ from parents (to fund extracurricular activities), which have been deemed by key actors (such as ministers of parliament, policy commentators and kindergarten educators’ union leaders) to constitute a hidden payment that contravenes the legislative prohibition of for-profit education. Union leaders have also pointed out how the project favours the school sector, foreseeing a potential scenario where parents may prematurely take very young children out of kindergartens in order to secure a place in advance in high-demand schools, which will cater for children from the age of two upwards (Segovia, 2019). The enactment of this bill would drastically modify the landscape of school-based early childhood provision in Chile; crucially, it would reshape the contexts of the practice of the educators who work in these settings.

Methodology

As previously outlined, the article builds on my research with Chilean early childhood educators – a qualitative study framed within a psychosocial perspective. Specifically, I carried out free-associative group interviews (Lapping and Glynos, 2019) and conducted a psychoanalytically informed discourse analysis (Madill and Gough, 2016) of the data. This type of analysis is mostly concerned with the formal aspects of language (e.g. repetitions, omissions, slips of the tongue and silences), which are deemed to offer clues to the affective and emotional aspects of discourse. While the overall study focused on the psychoanalytic interpretation of the unconscious dynamics that underlay the educators’ affect-laden utterances and interactions, for the purposes of this article, I focus on the thematic contents that emerged from these exchanges, acknowledging that such exchanges took place in the context of ongoing discussions on substantive topics in ECE. Specifically, I conducted a discourse-analysis-informed thematic analysis. First, I selectively coded the data that emerged in particularly emotionally invested exchanges between the educators. I traced these exchanges by searching for hints of emotion in their discourse; examples of these hints included speech becoming faster or louder, overlapping speech (i.e. when the educators interrupted each other), sighing, shrugging, turning their gaze away and shaking their head. Some of the codes that emerged at this stage were the ‘importance of respecting children’s agency’, ‘overwhelmingness of classroom practice’, ‘role of expert knowledge in asserting oneself professionally’ and ‘threats of schoolification’. Following this, I searched for and coded other instances of these topics throughout the data. Then, I produced initial families with these codes, which revolved around the ‘challenges posed by different contexts of practice’, the ‘criticality of developing a strong professional identity’ and stringent views on what a ‘proper adherence to ECE ethos’ entailed. Lastly, I grouped these families under the overarching theme of ‘differences between school-based and kindergarten-based ECE’, encompassing the key emerging issues and further interpreting their significance and implications in the light of relevant literature on professional identities. As can be seen, my analysis has elements of Braun and Clarke’s (2006) model of thematic analysis – notably, the coding and grouping of data with similar meanings.

The data was produced by conducting six free-associative group interviews with two groups of four educators, and individual follow-up interviews with each of the educators. Free-associative interviews are a type of unstructured interview in which the participants are asked to say everything that comes to mind in response to an initial prompt (e.g. a word, image or artefact). In my interviews, I utilised prompts such as the word ‘children’ and short curriculum extracts to stimulate the group discussion around key aspects of their professional identities. On the other hand, the individual follow-up interviews I conducted after the series of group interviews had the purpose of exploring the educators’ experience of participating in the group interviews, and gave them the opportunity to share any further reflections. I utilised a purposive sample; the potential participants were early childhood educators who had previously voluntarily attended an ECE course (e.g. a postgraduate programme or a continuous professional development course). The rationale for inviting this profile of early childhood educators was to maximise the possibility of recruiting educators who had already demonstrated a keenness to engage with demanding reflexive activities. In Chile, early childhood educators must undertake a four-year undergraduate degree in ECE, which allows them to teach children from birth to five (until the beginning of primary education), while no further teaching qualifications are mandatory to practise. The eight recruited participants were female educators with varied professional backgrounds: six worked in the classroom and two worked in academia. The six practising educators worked in state-funded settings – four in school-based settings and two in kindergartens. They had between 12 and 37 years of experience, and their ages ranged from late thirties to early fifties. Of these six participants, the two more experienced educators had worked with children from birth to five, while the other four tended to specialise in particular age groups. In what follows, I give a concise account of my analysis of their discussion on the differences between school-based and kindergarten-based ECE, drawing on verbatim interview extracts in order to substantiate my interpretation of the data.

Findings and discussion

The ‘differences between school-based and kindergarten-based ECE’ seemed to be of particular importance to the educators. This can be seen in the fact that this topic arose on several occasions during the unstructured group interviews, in which the educators had ample freedom to choose what to discuss.

The perils of school-based practice: resisting schoolification

The educators in the study understood schoolification as a threat that was inevitably inherent in school-based practice, and gave some indications of the development of resistance against its perceived pervasive effect. They expressed the view that the early childhood ‘educations’ that take place in kindergartens and schools are entirely different. From their perspective, regardless of the fact that they are catering for the same children, these two types of early childhood practice are completely disconnected from each other and often exhibit conflicting expectations :

The differences in EC education between what happens in kindergartens and in schools; they seem to be two different worlds that don't dialogue with each other, even though it's true that we are the same educational level, we should have the same interests, make the same emphases, [yet] they seem to fade. (Iris, individual interview)

The literature has found that some early childhood educators think that it is better to practise in school-based settings than in kindergartens as schools offer a more professionalising environment, which allows practitioners to de-emphasise the care aspect of the profession. It has been pointed out that this can be especially the case with educators who are working towards a university degree in ECE (Gibson, 2013), and that this tendency to ‘run away’ from the care aspect of the profession may lead to the undesired effect of schoolification (Ortlipp et al., 2011). Conversely, the participants in this study seemed to share the underlying presupposition that kindergarten-based ECE is better than school-based ECE, thereby setting the standard of what proper early childhood practice should look like. This idealised notion seemed to go hand in hand with a perception that kindergartens have exclusive knowledge about the child, to which schools have no access. However, in the participants’ view, the demands of the school level – with its high accountability pressures and proneness to schoolification – frequently overpower the aims of ECE, making it very difficult for early childhood educators to practise in school-based settings. A critical consequence of the miscommunication between these ‘two worlds’ can be the often contested progression of children from kindergarten to the school setting, a progression that kindergarten educators feel they must safeguard beyond their own setting. This concern is exemplified by one of the kindergarten educators describing taking part in coordination meetings with the primary school that her students attend after leaving the kindergarten:

We met the EC educators from the school … to pass all the information we have about our children to them … in socio-affective terms, in terms of their families … but the experience was so unfortunate … All we [heard was] problems and complaints; that they move too much and don't abide by rules … So, at some point … I said, ‘I beg your pardon. These are children we're talking about’ … Children are movement by essence. I [thought], ‘Geez. In which hands have we left them?’ [They said,] ‘They have to concentrate’ … But they are four years old. What level of concentration can a four-year-old have? … I think their pedagogical approach is very adultist, therefore without any meaning and of no interest for the children. (Iris, group interview)

Iris disagreed with the school early childhood educators’ focus on children's imperfections and shortcomings, deeming their approach insensitive and developmentally inappropriate, and attributing these uninformed expectations of children to a schoolified, ‘adultist’ pedagogical approach. This position-taking exemplifies how a developmentalist perspective – epitomised in the notion of developmentally appropriate practice (National Association for the Education of Young Children, 2009) – while often deemed prescriptive and normative (Cannella, 2012; Chang-Kredl, 2018), can in fact be used by early childhood educators as a means to resist normalising discourses on the child, like those enacted in schools. Concurrently, the educators in this study acknowledged that kindergartens could be subject to the pressures of schoolification as well, being also part of the wider schooling system. They considered defying schoolification as an important part of their role, even when practising within kindergartens, and identified the national early childhood curriculum as a source of help in doing this:

EC education has goals … and one kind of leaves them aside, ignores them to fulfil others’ goals and expectations … we lose meaning … [when you] go back to the EC national curriculum … then your work as an EC educator makes sense … your role as an EC educator. (Iris, group interview)

While the literature has pointed out the irrelevance of hierarchical notions of expert knowledge to the construction of meaningful understandings of professionalism in ECE (Urban, 2008), in this case it can be argued that the educators considered specialised curricular knowledge as a valuable professional identity discourse, beyond seeing it as a mere source of professional validation.

As suggested in this section, the participants aimed to differentiate themselves clearly from school-based early childhood practice and its poor understanding of how children learn and what their needs are. This sharp differentiation seemed to strengthen the educators’ resistance to schoolification, which they were willing to defy from within the kindergarten and beyond the classroom. It can be argued that the pillars of this resistance include a well-defined understanding of the early childhood ethos and the early childhood educator’s professional role, with both aspects being supported by an engagement with specialised knowledge of ECE.

The double othering of school-based early childhood educators

Osgood (2006b, 2010), amongst others, has presented early childhood educators as a unified body. As an alternative to this, in this section I explore some lines of potential fragmentation. Using a participant's account of practising in a school-based setting, I show how the school context may both exacerbate and destabilise the way in which early childhood educators resist and differentiate themselves from the school's understanding of ECE and its concomitant effect of schoolification. It exacerbates this clear differentiation as practising in a school makes the difference between the ECE ethos and the school ethos particularly evident. Yet, at the same time, it destabilises the cohesive effect of this delimitation as school-based early childhood educators are seen as a different type of early childhood professional, whose positioning in relation to this professional identity boundary remains unclear.

The participants who worked in school-based settings described what they perceived to be a generalised lack of appreciation for ECE in school contexts, where kindergarten learning and early childhood educators are often not valued. The school-based educators described feelings of invisibility within the wider school community, which were often associated with spatial isolation from the rest of the school. However, they saw this spatial isolation at times as potentially good, offering a protective distance from the pressures of school and conferring on them a certain feeling of agency. Eve, one of the teachers who practised in a school, described how the schoolteachers in her school minimised the ECE work:

We realise that people from the ‘other side’ [primary school] still say [about kindergarten children], ‘Oh … they are so little, so cute. Are they really capable of doing that? Because they are so little … Oh, poor little things’. So … they pity them, you see? So, we tell them, ‘Ahem, they are children. They are children just like the ones you have there [in primary education]. They are just at a different stage, and they learn as well’. (Eve, group interview)

While Eve here stressed the minimisation of children over the dismissal of the work of educators, the need for early childhood educators to constantly assert themselves in schools was frequently addressed in the participants’ discussions. Language played an important role in the participants’ perceptions of invisibility, making this a key sphere to pay attention to and intervene in to assert themselves professionally:

Eve: [The new headmaster] asked, ‘Are there any criticisms? What are the strengths, weaknesses [of the school]?’ [And] I said … ‘The use of language … We are EC education, we are EC educators, we are not parvulitas [‘little kindergarten girls’] or pre-primary’. So, I fight for that. I tell the primary education people, ‘You are not pre- …’.

Iris: Pre-secondary.

Eve: Exactly. We are not pre-primary either. We are the level of EC education, and I have many colleagues who no longer use the term ‘pre-primary’ … Other colleagues don't care much about this, but I do care because … according to that language … it is what is expected from us. (Group interview)

Eve demanded use of the correct terms to refer to ECE, making explicit its equal status with other school education levels; primary education is not referred to as ‘pre-secondary’, hence ECE should not be called ‘pre-primary’. This may be an indication of how early childhood educators’ professional capabilities are perceived. While the most prevalent tension addressed by the educators involved the antagonism between early childhood practice as a whole and the school level, Eve described her experience, as a school-based educator, of being othered not only by primary teachers, but also by early childhood educators – that is, of being seen and treated as alien to both of these groups:

You're between the primary teachers, who say, ‘You take too much care of children’ … and … the early childhood educators, who teach lower levels, say, ‘You schoolify them too much’. So, we [school-based educators] end up being … ‘the ham of the sandwich’ [laughs]. (Eve, individual interview)

As shown here, school-based early childhood educators can find themselves between two camps. It is not only a matter of tension in relation to the school level; early childhood educators from ‘lower levels’ (who teach children up to three years old and are almost exclusively based in kindergartens) can also have an unfavourable view of school-based early childhood educators’ (who are frequently in charge of four-year-old and five-year-old classes) practice. This state of things leaves Eve feeling like ‘the ham of the sandwich’ – a Spanish-language saying that is used to describe being in the middle ground between two antagonistic positions and the frustrating experience of trying to mediate between them, in the absence of a willingness to compromise. This example epitomises how school-based educators can be othered by both schoolteachers and kindergarten-based educators, arguably contradicting the suggestion in the literature that early childhood educators have a homogeneous experience of belonging to the early childhood workforce in terms of how the profession is perceived and the professional identities they embody (Osgood, 2006b). On the contrary, Eve's experience shows how the fragmentation and discontinuities between school-based and kindergarten-based practice can have a subjective impact on the professional identities of school-based educators. As she continued to describe her experience of practising in a school, Eve ultimately came to terms with the fact that her practice conceivably looks different from kindergarten practice. She works with older children, who seem to want something different from what ECE offers – they sometimes want ‘some school’:

[Schoolification] has never made sense to me, but talking to them [kindergarten-based educators] made me give more meaning to what I do and where I do it … It couldn't be like what they do because they teach other levels, completely different … I'm closer to primary education, unfortunately … which doesn't mean I agree with schoolifying EC education – no, no. But it's a different child development stage, what they have to learn or … or the way – what they want as well, because … sometimes they also want, they want some school but, but … not as much, not like being in first grade. (Eve, individual interview)

This extract shows how Eve's practice may not constitute complete compliance with the constraints of practising in a school-based setting, reflecting instead the enactment of different views on the way children learn, particular to the specific age group of the children she teaches. Building on this observation, it can be argued that a contested context of practice like Eve's may stimulate the development of something like a liminal early childhood professional identity, in constant negotiation between the two mutually unsympathetic worlds of ECE and schools.

Liminality has been conceptualised as ‘the subjective state of being on the threshold between two different existential positions’, which can pose a particular challenge to the production of occupational identities (Ybema et al., 2011: 21). It has also been described as ‘being continually situated in the middle of others; and constantly reformulating the self, in order to build relationships with [them]’ (Reed and Thomas, 2021: 225). Both of these understandings seem to resonate with Eve's experience of her context of practice. Overall, the definition of liminality as a continuous state of ‘becoming’ (Reed and Thomas, 2021) coincides with the neo-liberal demand for workers to constantly reinvent themselves (Sennett, 2006, in Reed and Thomas, 2021: 220). While liminal spaces may offer people the opportunity to interrogate who they are (Turner, 1987, in Chen and Reay, 2021), professionals can experience them in different ways – for example, as a threat to their professional identity (Petriglieri, 2011: 641), in response to which – among many other possible responses – they may try to change the importance of that identity to them (Petriglieri, 2011: 648) or engage in what has been called ‘parking’ their professional identity, where they stop thinking about what their role means to their sense of self in order to create the mental space necessary to do their job (Chen and Reay, 2021: 1559). In Eve's case, while she ultimately seems to try to negotiate a distinctive school-based early childhood educator identity, it is possible that some of these conflictive identitary responses to liminality are also at play. While authors like Manning-Morton (2006) have discussed the liminality of ECE in relation to other professions, there is ample space in the literature for exploring liminality within the early childhood profession along the lines of what I have presented here.

This concise analysis of my empirical data has allowed me to destabilise the often unexamined dichotomy between ‘proper’ kindergarten-based and ‘schoolified’ school-based early childhood practice, and therefore to problematise the apparent cohesiveness of early childhood educator identities. As seen, kindergartens can be subject to schoolification too as they try to satisfy the demands of the school level. Similarly, socialising children in their final years of ECE in some ‘schoolified’ activities may not be altogether wrong; not all school-based educators are necessarily ‘schoolified’, and educators may engage in ‘schoolifying’ practices by choice, without it always being a matter of subjugation. The fact that some early childhood educators can be othered by fellow early childhood educators because of their context of practice shows how early childhood educator identities may not be as unified as it has been proposed. While uniting in resistance against schools ‘from the outside’ seems to be quite an organic process, trying to enact this resistance ‘from within’ the school is much more complicated; it is likely to end up being doubly othered. As argued here, a possible effect of this predicament – of the impossibility of fully identifying with a school or a kindergarten subjectivity – could be the emergence of a distinctive liminal identity in constant negotiation of an impossible role.

Conclusion

This article has discussed some of the tensions between school-based and kindergarten-based ECE, as identified by practising early childhood educators themselves, with a focus on the challenges faced by educators who practise in schools and some of the complex ways in which their everyday experiences may shape their identities. In doing so, I have aimed to defy oversimplified understandings of the relation between educators and their contexts of practice, and how these contexts affect the construction of their professional identities.

While early childhood educators – in their negotiation of discourses of quality, care and professionalism – certainly face similar challenges relevant to the profession as a whole, I hope to have shown through my analysis of school-based ECE that specific contexts of practice may pose distinctive identitary challenges to early childhood educators. I have proposed the notion of liminality as a potentially productive conceptual framework to make sense of the production of early childhood educator professional identities in a school context. Yet beyond this suggestion, the key idea that I aim to put forward is that early childhood educators constitute a complex, multidetermined type of professional subjectivity, and their experiences and responses to the struggles of the profession are not necessarily homogeneous and cannot be completely anticipated.

As there is some indication that school-based ECE may become more prevalent internationally, as a result of neo-liberal policies in ECE, it is critical to further explore educators’ experiences of the school context and its implications for their identities and practice. As for the Chilean case, if the ‘Middle Levels Funding’ bill is approved, Chilean early childhood educators will increasingly face the challenge of practising in schools. The different ‘ECEs’ of the school and the kindergarten – and their early childhood educators with their similarities and differences – will then cohabit in the space of the school, an uncharted new context of practice that is bound to produce new early childhood subjectivities.