Abstract
This paper analyses the consequences of what are regarded as neoliberal developments within the Danish ECEC area. More specifically, it looks at how an increasing monitoring and regulation affects the ECEC educator’s sense of professionalism. Drawing on a qualitative study of educators’ interactionist accounts, a series of unintended consequences is identified that seriously challenge them in their daily work. Previous research has pointed out the risk that this can lead to a process of deprofessionalization, in the sense that it limits professional autonomy and reduces the educators to mere policy implementers or ‘technicians’. But as I will demonstrate, a ground-up perspective on the reaction of the ECEC educators reveals degrees of agency and discretion that adds to this discussion, pointing towards not only deprofessisonalization, but also new forms of professionalism.
Introduction
A considerable number of analyses have shown how the field of day care in Europe and the rest of the world in recent decades has undergone dramatic developments, as a result of what is often referred to as a neoliberal agenda (Fenech, Sumsion and Shep, 2010; Moloney et al., 2019; Moss, 2006, 2014; Osgood, 2006, 2010). This agenda is based on the idea that investing in early childhood will yield increased financial returns (Cunha et. al., 2006; Penn, 2010). The core notion within this agenda is that centrally defined quality improvement of early childhood education and care (ECEC) can potentially enhance educational achievement and employment rates and prevent social problems (Dahlberg and Moss, 2005; Yulindraseri and Ujianti, 2018).
The consequences of this agenda on education are increasing monitoring and regulation of ECEC and of the professionals involved. Although these changes have not become equally established in all countries (Sims et al., 2018), the general importance of the neoliberal agenda has attracted quite considerable research interest.
On the one hand, monitoring and evaluating ECEC practice can be perceived as an important component of enhancing quality in ECEC systems. As Litjens (2013: 5) states, it can point to strengths and weaknesses of systems and programmes, provide incentives for improvement of standards and practices, and can assist staff in enhancing children’s early development. Research findings on the effects of monitoring in ECEC indicate some positive effects of monitoring on staff behaviour and practices as well as curriculum implementation, which can positively impact child development, and monitoring can lead to an overall increase in service quality.
These studies focus on policy as language, as texts and documents, and the strength of this approach is precisely to show how children, and the whole field of ECEC, are becoming enveloped in a new economically oriented policy strategy, with particular links to rationales around accountability and on the ‘competition state’ (Cerny, 1997). However, as mentioned, educators are often spoken of as passive victims, whose professional autonomy is overshadowed by external management or performance requirements. Or, they are seen as a dormant rebel movement, seduced or lulled into passivity, needing to be aroused to fight back (Dahlberg, Moss and Pence, 2013; Fenech et al., 2010; Nordin and Wahlström, 2019; Osgood 2006, 2010). These analyses, by their very nature, do not show any great interest in day-to-day practice in day care centres. A pertinent question is therefore: how do educators themselves experience this development? Does the thesis that an unintentional consequence of the neoliberal agenda is deprofessionalization resonate with the experiences and views of the professionals? In Dalli’s words (2008: 171), this article’s contribution is to seek a ‘ground-up’ perspective on professionalism that reflects the reality of educators’ work experiences by focusing on educators’ own voices and stories. In this context, I explore professionalism not as a theoretical concept, but as the qualities of the work that early childhood professionals utilize, negotiate and associate with, in their everyday practice. Drawing on Evetts (2006), professionalism is the ways in which professionals themselves accept, incorporate and accommodate the idea of profession in their work.
Based on an analysis of a number of focus group interviews with Danish ECEC educators, this article examines how educators actively navigate workplace changes and new requirements. The research question is: how do educators create and negotiate meaning in their professional work, where increasing external regulation and governance has a wide range of unintended consequences? The first part of the article provides an insight into the Danish ECEC context, where the introduction of new public management (NPM) has manifested itself in the form of a national curriculum for 0- to 6-year-olds, but also in locally initiated implementation of a variety of educational ‘concepts’. Both the curriculum and the concepts involve a methodological encroachment, which, based on the desire to raise the quality of the education, entails various marked shifts in educators’ professional orientations, tasks and obligations.
The second half of the article presents findings from an empirical study that identifies unintended consequences of the neoliberal agenda as discrepancies between external demands and expectations and practical reality as experienced by the educators. The article also shows how educators actively respond to unintended consequences by (re)interpreting, choosing, rejecting, prioritizing, adapting and negotiating with new requirements, methods and procedures in order to make them meaningful in the local contexts. The data thus provide insight into educators’ active transformation, which does not unequivocally suggest deprofessionalization, rather, that their professionalism is actually constituted by their active translating and connecting, involving various ways of balancing external and internal requirements and expectations. The article thus suggests that it is precisely the educators’ handling of the unintended consequences of increased neoliberal governance that reveals their professionalism.
The Danish ECEC context
Denmark has a unitary and mainly public system of early childhood education and care for children aged from 6 months to 6 years. The responsible national authority is the Ministry of Children and Education. Local authorities are responsible for the funding, organization and regulation of ECEC. Early childhood services include both age-integrated (0–5 years) and age-separated (0–2 years, 3–5 years) ECEC centres and regulated home-based provision (Schreyer and Oberhuemer, 2017).
Denmark has more children under 3 years in publicly subsidized ECEC than any other country in Europe. Ninety per cent of all 1- to 2-year-olds and 97% of all 3- to 5-year-olds are in ECEC, spending an average of 7.5 hours a day there. Sixty per cent of the staff has a bachelor’s degree, and they constitute the largest professional group in Denmark. There are approximately 5000 ECEC centres in Denmark, 88% of which are run by the local authority. This is a very costly area in local and national budgets (about 2% of GDP). In line with general cuts in the public sector, ECEC centres have had to reduce costs considerably in the past 10 years.
In terms of professional traditions, the Danish ECEC educators have previously had a high degree of autonomy, in which professionalism has developed ‘from the inside’, that is, from the educators themselves. When, back in the 1960s, day care centres first became widespread in Denmark, they were primarily intended as a kind of ‘baby-sitting’ related to the labour market, particularly to help the increasing numbers of women going out to work (Hansen, Bech and Plum, 2004: 20). Day care expanded rapidly until the late 1990s, when universal access was achieved in line with the increasing need for care. What is remarkable about this huge expansion is that despite society’s preoccupation with universal access, there was no similarly increased interest in decisions about the content of day care. The educational goals of ECEC were only stated in very general terms (Kampmann, 2004: 519). The gradual professionalization of educators therefore developed primarily as a normatively based and regulated concern constructed within the profession itself (Kampmann, 2014: 18). This also explains why Denmark does not have a long tradition of formal child-related assessment.
With the arrival of the new millennium, however, a number of events occurred that in different ways represented a break with the traditional self-understanding of the educational profession. There has been a gradual but quite significant expansion of the number of interested parties, with various stakeholders having much more distinct demands as to the purpose of day care centres. One example is the school system pushing for various learning and disciplinary requirements (Aabro, 2014). But parents have also made their mark in the field, with legislation making parent committees in all local authority day care centres mandatory. Last but not least, levels of management have arrived in full force. More direct governance has replaced the somewhat peripheral regulation of ECEC, where both central and local government have formulated multiple goals and rationales for how children should benefit from day care centres.
In 2004, a national curriculum was introduced which required all day care centres to promote children’s learning within six defined themes. The curriculum was strengthened in various areas in 2018, especially with regard to increased requirements for learning, documentation and evaluation and more concerted efforts to identify vulnerable children. At the same time, local authorities have introduced stricter requirements on systematic work, standardization, documentation and recording of targeted educational interventions (Andersen, 2011).
As part of these efforts to ensure increased systematic and high-quality work in the education of children aged 0–5 years, it has become widespread practice to purchase (various types of) commercial pedagogical ‘concepts’, which are then implemented locally in day care centres. These ‘concepts’ target different areas, have different origins and various names, such as manual-based programmes, evidence-based methods, professional tools and assessment toolkits. In this article, I use the overarching term ‘concept’ for all of these, because they all share the particular characteristic that they can be used in any ECEC context regardless of specific educational factors that may apply to particular day care centres. In this understanding, the concepts are grounded in a basic idea or plan, which, by virtue of its apparently universal character, is relatively easy to transfer from one context to another. This may mean from one local authority to another, from schools to day care centres, or even from other countries (typically Norway or the US) to the Danish ECEC context.
The stated goal of these systems is to govern and define educators’ assessments and categorizations of children based on abstract standards and indicators. In a previous survey covering all 98 local authorities in Denmark, I showed that these concepts had become very widespread; the most popular were TRAS (Tidlig registrering av språkutvikling/Monitoring Early Language Development), ICDP (International Child Development Programme), the LP Model (Learning environment and Pedagogical analysis) and ‘The Incredible Years’. At the time of the survey, they were being used in 61, 42, 35 and 20 local authorities respectively, out of 98 (Aabro, 2016).
Danish educational researchers also became concerned about the extension of governance and the many new accountability requirements, which could lead to unfortunate shifts of focus, where measurable and planned activities were promoted at the expense of more spontaneous and intuitive ones, in conjunction with a disregard of educators’ professional discretion. In keeping with the positions mentioned at the beginning of this article, one of the common concerns is that the increasing governance and the many new accountability requirements result in the delegitimation or deprofessionalization of ECEC staff. This is done, for example, by downplaying educators’ situation-based discretion in favour of approved and standardized instructions for action (Hjort, 2009). As Schmidt (2018) points out, a particular neoliberal discourse is permeating day care centres in the form of imperatives that promote and hierarchize learning-specific and measurable forms of knowledge and practice. In addition to restricting educators’ room for discretion, this is also seen as potentially causing unfortunate shifts in educational work. For example, it can classify everyday practical tasks such as changing nappies, helping children with their clothes, drying runny noses, clearing tables, etc., as being unskilled or ‘unnoticed’ (see e.g. Ahrenkiel et al., 2012).
Methods, empirical design and data
In the following, I will show how educators go about their work in the face of increasing external governance, based on the assumption that they actively ascribe professional meaning to this. I draw on data from a recent project where I was interested in ascertaining how the external governance logics are seen to interact with the internally established contextual practices, and how this interaction between external and internal logics shapes itself as professionalism. The project is based on an interest in the active agency of educators, partly inspired by Michael Lipsky’s (2010) point that policy governance should not only be understood as top-down, but also needs to include a ground-up perspective. This means the final link in the chain, the front line workers, do not merely implement policies, but to a large extent use their judgement to reshape, translate and convert policies and to actively engage in daily practice. One might presume that educators’ room for discretion is narrowing as more rules are established on how decisions should be made by front line staff, but this is not necessarily the case. Paradoxically, more rules may very well create room for more discretion. As Evans and Harris (2004) point out, rules are often contradictory and the distribution of roles and responsibilities between staff is similarly unclear, requiring a high degree of local interpretation. For this reason, neither the national curricula nor the ‘concepts’ used should be regarded as fully closed and monolithic governance technologies. Perhaps these forms of governance work in other ways than those prescribed by goals and milestones, and by manuals and instructions. Perhaps the immediately obvious notion of almost causal regularity, despite being firmly fixed, is actually full of holes and cracks.
In the project, I therefore adopted an interactionist view of educators as active practitioners who seize on, reshape the various demands and expectations, and merge them with their specific contextual everyday practices. To make judgements and assessments in day care centres requires a high degree of relational and social skills, which can only be developed through participation, that is, negotiation of meaning in communities of practice with colleagues (Wenger, 1998). This is a perspective that places a particular emphasis on the meaning that people attach to their environment. Meaning is what makes us understand, engage, and handle our professional work. The term has an individual as well as a collective dimention, but the process of creating meaning is always social, it takes place in interaction and negotiation with the surrounding world (ibid.) Meaning is understood here, with inspiration from Weick (1995), as active sense-making that does not aim to pinpoint a precise understanding of problems or situations, but rather acts as necessary filters we actively establish to help us deal with overwhelming complexity.
On the one hand, my goal was to understand the nature of these governance conditions that have entered the domain of ECEC and affected the educators. On the other hand, I also wished to understand how educators experience and handle these controls in relation to their own local practices. This was not an either/or perspective; I did not see it as an issue that could be reduced to a battle between the internal and external elements. My objective was not to limit the problem to a binary dichotomy. Rather, it was to enhance understanding by focusing on the complex relationalities involved. It was thus an attempt to address – not redress – pedagogical professionalism, by establishing various dialogic spaces where the voices of educators could be heard.
Focus group interviews
In order to capture the voices of educators, specifically in relation to their experiences and views of their work, I chose the focus group interview as my method. The focus group interview can be defined as a group discussion arrangement that focuses on a selected topic, where data is primarily generated through the participants’ interaction. Instead of the interviewer asking each person in turn, the idea is therefore to encourage the participants to talk together, to ask questions, exchange anecdotes and comment on each other’s experiences and views.
My choice of the focus group interview as a method was based on my predominant interest in educators’ contextual perceptions of their professional practices. The choice of the focus group interview gave me the opportunity to examine how educators’ views of their work and their professionalism are constructed, expressed, negotiated, defended and sometimes also modified through dialogue with others. Ideas, opinions and understandings are not generated by individuals in isolation, but emerge in interaction with others in specific social contexts. In focus groups, participants are confronted with the need to create meaning out of their individual experiences and perceptions, that is, ‘collective sense-making in action’ (Wilkinson, 1998). Educators’ professionalism is a complex phenomenon that cannot be separated from institutional or historical contexts or from identity and power relationships (Ozga, 2000). Since understandings of professionalism are so closely linked to context, focus group interviews may be considered a particularly suitable method, because they reveal contexts, connections and all the messy interrelationships that occur in conversations, which are not included in questionnaires (Waterton and Wynne, 1999: 130).
The choice of a qualitative method such as the focus group interview underlines that the purpose of the project is not to achieve statistical representation. Rather, the purpose is to conduct what Kuzel (1992, in Barbour and Kitzinger, 1999: 7) calls ‘qualitative sampling’, understood as an effort to structure a certain number of samples based on an attempt at institutional demographic and geographical diversity. This has therefore been taken into account in the selection of educators in terms of geographical spread and some institutional variation (especially in size, but also to a lesser extent in selecting public, private and self-owned day care centres).
I conducted seven focus group interviews in seven localities in Denmark. Each interview lasted four hours. My choice of such extended interviews was to give the participants a better opportunity to get to know each other and warm to the conversation. The interviews were loosely structured. My decision not to use a highly structured interview guide responded to the project aim; to give educators a voice based on their own experiences. The goal was to initiate and encourage dialogue between the participants, allowing them to share their experiences and views on their work as educators and their professionalism. More specifically, I asked all the participants each to bring an everyday story from their ECEC practice to the interview, which then formed a starting point for the dialogue. Thus, these stories formed the foundation of each interview session. Here is an example, a story told by an educator named Linda: All the children are outside at the playground after lunchtime, and there is a lot of things going on. Probably too much. One of the educators is preparing a bonfire, since we are making hot chocolate for a birthday celebration. Two educators just went inside for a break, and I am helping some of the older children to start a fishing game. Two little girls come running down from the forest, shouting: ‘Linda, we’ve found a sponge.’ We have a small forest down at the end of our playground. I go with them down and we pick up the fungus that they found, and I tell them that I really appreciate that they came to get me, and that they are really good at spotting the mushrooms. Back at the playground, I help some children put carts on the back of their bikes. It’s tricky, since the buckets that the kids placed on the carts are too big. We arrange them the best we can, and I suggest that we put all the leaves in one bucket instead of two. But the children are not happy with this solution, since it’s not the same ‘type of food’. Then we hang one bucket on the handlebars and the children are happy with the solution. One of our oldest girls quietly looks at me while I fix all this and waits until we finish getting the carts in place. Then she says, ‘Linda, when you’re done with everything, would you please take down the box of insect glasses for me? I found a ladybird.’ I notice that her hand clenches around the ladybird, and I realize that she has actually followed me around for quite some time.
An analytical approach
My analytical focus was on the group rather than the individual, in an attempt to strike a balance between looking at the overall picture of the group and seeing the individual voices and their function in the group. Each focus group consisted of a number of educators, each of whom brought their own perspectives, stories and experiences, based on their years of work. There was considerable differences between the educators. However, it was not the mission of the project to explore these differences. On the contrary, the focus was on the group interaction, their common constructions of pedagogical professionalism. In this way, the focus group interview becomes an attempt to simulate the situations in the educators’ everyday practice where they discuss their approaches with one another and try to create collective meaning from the various conditions and requirements they face in a day’s work.
I was curious to find out what groups of educators emphasize as important when talking about their work, what practices are highlighted and how educators respond to each other. Focus group interviews are not just settings where ideas are clarified, but are marked by constant negotiation that involves a piece of the identity of all the participants, and by the fact that positions are in constant flux around the topics discussed (Waterton and Wynne, 1999: 133). Consequently, my analysis was not a distillation attempt, sifting transscripts to locate associations between predefined key concepts. Instead, the analysis focuses on relationships between the educators in the group and how their views are developed and defined interactively in the relationship between speech acts and reactions. These interactions will present different kinds of ambivalences and ambiguities, but these will not be seen as authentic expressions of professionalism per se, but as dynamic processes in which some participants left comments ‘floating in the air’, while others seized and further developed them (Waterton and Wynne, 1999: 136).
Regarding the strategy for analysis, I have sought an explorative, open approach, inspired by Grounded Theory (Charmaz, 2015), giving way to the unexpected, and resisting the ‘impulse to obscure troublesome ambiguities, anomalies, irregularities and inconsistencies using large-scale, all-embracing models’ (Järvinen and Mik-Meyer, 2005). The aim has been inductive, to look for patterns and categories in the material, searching for ‘professionalism’ as a sensitizing concept (Blumer, 1954) – that is, a ‘middle-range’ concept – that, on the one hand, align with my own understandings, but on the other do not fall into a narrow hypothesis-testing approach, where I simply verify the already established definition. As mentioned, the goal is not to test professionalism as a definitive concept, but to use it as an empirical category that shows sensitivity to the diversity of the statements, and which I therefore also adjusted along the way (Bowen, 2006).
Consequently, I break with the notion of pre-existing (and permanently established) ideas, opinions and understandings, located in the heads of the participating individuals; instead, I assume that meaning is produced collectively through social interaction between the participants. Instead of asking how often, and to what extent, educators talk about their professionalism, it is more a question of considering how educators express their professionalism. This was therefore not a systematic study across a large data set. It is far more selective and limited in its focus, which is to seek detailed interpretations of educators’ comments on their everyday social communication and action processes as they unfold in the focus group discussion (Wilkinson, 1998: 195).
Analysis: A ground-up perspective on the unintended consequences of the neoliberal agenda
The first point to notice in the dialogues between the many educators is that they are working in a field that seems highly constrained. In all the interviews, they highlight their working conditions as determining most of what takes place in the day care centre. The educators find that they are too busy, that there are too many children and too few adults, that they have too little time, that there are too many practical tasks and that there are far too many interruptions. In this context, the educators appear surprisingly loyal. They speak in terms of ‘we’, that is, as representative of the day care centre that suffers the same fate as themselves. They show loyalty, not only to the centre, but also to colleagues, leaders, partners, parents and children, even though they report being under extreme pressure. They seem to be very concerned about looking after each other, their collegial relationships, the children and the parents. Furthermore, they consistently show solidarity with the unqualified assistants; they are generally pleased with them and also feel responsible for them. In other words, cooperation is a key aspect of their orientation towards creating coherence in their everyday work. This applies particularly to collegial cooperation; here, the educators present different categorizations of their colleagues. They find that their colleagues have varying attitudes to the increased monitoring and control, and they describe how they deal with the pressure very differently. A key element of their work is therefore to try to get all the staff members on the same side, to promote good collaborative culture, while also showing each other flexibility, and improvising and swapping roles. They take each other’s place, complement each other and cover for each other.
The second very significant point to be found in all the interviews is the question of governance. The educators all talk a great deal about systems, about programmes, about plans, and in general about various external initiatives that bring certain special interests into the day care centres that educators need to relate to. This is particularly true of local councils, however the educators also feel that leaders, schools and parents all have different plans for what should be the priorities in ECEC. Sometimes the educators describe these interests as a form of soft expectations, but sometimes as very specific and mandatory requirements. Local government control plays a large part in the educators’ discussions. Particularly the many documentation requirements and the great variety of programmes or concepts seem to constrain the educators; they talk of increased systematization, increased formalization, increased writing and increased targeting. But the educators also feel that it is a very dynamic form of governance that is constantly changing in character. As several of them put it, ‘There’s always something new coming’.
No clear picture emerges of what the new municipally initiated monitorial programmes, ‘concepts’ and systems mean for the work of the educators or for their professionalism. On the one hand, they mention that many of the external documentation and control requirements are neither relevant nor useful. These programmes are seen to take up time and do not capture what educators find most relevant in their work, namely their close relationships with the children. With the narratives that typically encompany these types of programmes, enhancing quality and sharpening the professional focus, the material demonstrates various signs of unintended consequences in the form of irrelevant shifts and distractions. In the following short sequence, an educator talks about the introduction of these systems and programmes that educators are asked to use. This sequence shows that both the curricular work and the municipal concepts have something to offer to educators, not least a new framework and a new language in which to understand their professionalism (which especially benefits their cooperation with the parents), but also in cooperation with each other. This offers some insight into why the educators might actively choose specific concepts/agendas. Those ‘development plans’, you know, they are so easy to use. And when we all focus on it, that’s when things start moving. So, in that respect …That’s also one of the best things about The Incredible Years, you see? But it’s true that we are under pressure. Sometimes you might realise that you are addressing children in a completely wrong way. Then you have to say: ‘You know what? I’m sorry about that. I don’t even know why I said that.’ So. I just have to apologize.
Many of the concepts seem to be adopted and practised very differently by different educators and are adapted for a wide variety of purposes. For example, as an educator says in the following, one concern can be that an unmediated use of a method or programme can either pressure or intimidate the children. So it needs to be balanced, to uphold the sense of precense: I really believe in acknowledging the children, recognizing them, seeing them, really seeing them, not just like ‘this is right, this is wrong’. Giving yourself time to get to know what they are into, what they find difficult, and why. How can I help you? And there I think finding the balance is important. When do I help, when should I leave them alone or give them space? And when do I pressure them too much, making them feel inadequate or incompetent? So finding the right balance is important, helping them where they are. And that takes a great deal of presence, both towards the individual child, but also in the group. And then.when I think about my work, and the difficulty of finding the balance.when something new comes from ‘the top’ and we are controlled in a certain direction, how does it affect us? What happens to this true sense of presence? Sometimes a system enters, that determines the quality of our presence. How should we think, what is our focus? And that means shutting down aspects of our work. It is inevitable, right? And then I think the thing that we’re always getting controlled by measures from the outside, that’s forced on us. Ok, but how can I be apart of this? How can we, as a day care centre, be a part of these new measures? And in fact I think we’ve been pretty good at that. Because it’s about finding the time, isn’t it? Because really. a lot of times … we don’t get any extra ressources, so we also know we have to take it out of the time with the children, you see? For example Step by Step, it’s a small project about childrens feelings. When we worked with it before, we could always find time for it twice a week. Now we’ve just started working with it again. But this time it’s only once a week. We mustn’t have too high expectations, it’s better to be a bit realistic, because it is easier to take part in it.
Professionalism as acts of balancing unintended consequences
The educators feel that their work is unique, that it is all about relationships and creating good conditions that allow children to develop, and that such work requires close contact and care. It cannot be quantified, entered in a form or be given in a dose at specific times of day. One educator, during a discussion about what an educator actually is, describes it as follows: But there are many views on being an educator. And what does it mean to be an educator? If you look at other similar professions, like nurses, physiotherapists and social advisors, and if there’s a physiotherapist who gives you a schedule to take home and says: You need to do these exercises twice a day next week, well then you say: Yes, of course. If a nurse says: You have to take these pills twice a day for a week, you say: Yes, of course. If an educator says: It might be a very good idea if we did this twice a week. Then suddenly there can arise some personal opinions that … of course also have to be respected. Or parents might say: That’s not how we do it at home. How do we deal with this, whats in our toolbox?
This involves the ability to make different kinds of emotional assessments and alignments; the ability to ‘read’ children, ‘read’ parents, ‘read’ their colleagues and ‘read’ situations – that is, to sense everyone’s position and everyone’s needs. This sensing is a way to bring balance into relationships and group dynamics and to either maintain or change the atmosphere to allow them to respond to children, parents, and each other.
However, this approach requires a great deal of courage. Educators’ attitudes revolve around the importance of daring to rely on their own impulses, judgements and choices, and particularly having the courage to act on them in their everyday work where there are a large number of alternative views of the right thing to do, and where one’s practice within neoliberal policy regimes is constantly questioned and measured. It is crucial to dare to rely on one’s intuition, one’s gut feeling, and not to be afraid to intervene, divert, redirect or decide not to follow the plan. It takes courage to act confidently and convincingly, and perhaps even to defend one’s choices and to stand up for them, with colleagues, parents, leaders and local government. It takes courage, especially when educators feel that the right thing to do is to make educational choices that actively counteract the unintended consequences of governing constraints, in terms of prioritizing the children, their wellbeing and development. Even though professionalism is largely determined, and often directly limited, by the unintended consequences of controls and governance, the data also shows that educators are far from passive in these processes, but to a large extent form and actively develop various new professional competencies to navigate in the contradictory field of ECEC.
Conclusion
The self-understanding of what is generally referred to as neoliberal governance assumes that policies are implemented in linear, mechanical chains of execution, However, the policy initiatives have various unintended consequences, being subject to various kinds of transformations on their way down the organizational hierarchies. The question is therefore not whether there are unintended consequences, but rather how they are manifested and what they mean. This article demonstrates how the ‘provider level’ – that is, the professional ECEC educators – is constantly working to try to incorporate these new initiatives into their existing practice. The purpose of this article is therefore to explore the unintended consequences of the neoliberal agenda, from the viewpoint of Danish day care educators.
Does the governance result in what much of the discourse analytic tradition indicates, namely technicalization and a loss of autonomy, leading to deprofessionalization? Or do educators actively navigate, reshape and pragmatically prioritize between these policy initiatives, as a form of reprofessionalization? As I have shown, the answer is a bit of both. On the one hand, the increased level of external control represents a number of challenges for educators, especially in combination with deteriorating working conditions and budget cuts. In that respect, therefore, it may be said that educators strongly feel the unintended effects of the neoliberal approach to day care as undermining their professionalism. At the same time, these professionals do not appear as mere passive performers of an increasingly standardized practice. The analysis shows that educators should generally be regarded as active negotiators of meaning in their local professional environment. They negotiate the meaning of the increasing governance of their professional work (in the form of curricula and concepts) both in relation to their particular local context and to their various experiences and professionalism. Educators seem to generally accept these new approaches, systems and procedures as elements that obviously interfere, but also have something to offer in their attempts to make sense of their work. In other words, the policy initiatives also provide a number of system categories (and a language) that allow educators to mediate the many demands and expectations of the various stakeholders involved in a day care centre.
Taking into account the educators’ creative agency and sensemaking means that what might be seen as highly problematic from outside or from above, as an inappropriate intrusion into the autonomy or professionalism of the educators, also proves to be precisely what makes their everyday work seem interconnected for staff and for children. Educators select and reject concepts and curricula, reshape and adapt them, sometimes directly, sometimes simply as empty linguistic categories that they fill with their own context-bound practices and opinions, as legitimization of existing and collectively negotiated professional strategies. Certainly, the policy measures represent challenges and dilemmas for educators, involving a risk of tying down, restricting, or displacing their professional work in ways that contradict their own assessments of what is appropriate. On the other hand, as I have shown, something else is also taking place: educators are actively dealing with the unintended consequences, which do not merely lead to deprofessionalization, but also to new forms of complex reprofessionalization.
This ambivalence should be the object of further research. It should also interest policy makers who might thus begin to recognize educators’ professionalism as more than technical implementation, but as various examples of professionally appropriate, highly complex balancing acts, which are dependent on context, on resources, and on good working conditions.
Footnotes
Declaration of conflicting interests
The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Funding
The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
