Jayne Osgood

Reconstructing Professionalism in ECEC: The Case for the "Critically Reflective Emotional Professional".

This paper is concerned to present professionalism in Early Childhood Education and Care (ECEC) as a sociocultural construction. In particular the article is concerned with how professional identities are inflected by autobiography and the spaces and opportunities that exist for the construction of alternative professional identities. Drawing on a recent empirical study with nursery workers in London a critical appraisal of hegemonic discourses is presented and a consideration of ‘professionalism from within’ is offered. A specific focus is placed upon the notion of the ‘critically reflective emotional professional’ and how that might be taken up or resisted at different levels of the ECEC policy–practitioner landscape.

Professionalism and Performativity: The Feminist Challenge Facing Early Years Practitioners.

In this discussion paper, I seek to understand the complex interaction between notions of ‘professionalism’ and gendered identity constructions against the backdrop of increased state regulation and demands for performativity in the early years. I seek to explore the ways in which ‘teacher professionalism’ is constructed by government and how this transcends into a ‘discourse of derision’, which then becomes a subtle, yet powerful, means of controlling this occupational group. I conclude by presenting an alternative feminist conceptual framework for assessing the gendered nature of identity formation, and as an opportunity to consider the role agency can play when seeking to resist/renegotiate the rapid and powerful policy reform agenda in the early years.

Time to Get Down to Business? The Responses of Early Years Practitioners to Entrepreneurial Approaches to Professionalism

In this article theories of the gendered nature of new managerialism are drawn upon to examine the economic rationale behind educational reform (Trow, 1994) and the marketization and economization (Ozga, 2000) of early years education and childcare services. The author concentrates on the policy attention that the early years and childcare sector has attracted from the New Labour Government since 1998, and the implications of this attention. Through an analysis of the views and experiences of practitioners at the grassroots of early education and childcare it is argued that the application of business approaches is unhelpful and inappropriate. The evidence suggests that the top-down application of a specific policy designed to emphasize and promote new managerialist entrepreneurialism was unwelcome to an overwhelmingly resistant, almost exclusively female, group of practitioners. In conclusion, it is argued that whilst practitioners are committed to heightening their professionalism, the most appropriate means of realizing this is not through a business approach, but rather one which develops and nurtures practitioners’ preferred feminized ways of operating, along collaborative lines with an appreciation of the emotional investment and personal sacrifices they make.

Childcare workforce reform in England and ‘the early years professional’: a critical discourse analysis

This paper aims to explore the ways in which nursery workers are constructed through government discourse in England. This is done by offering a deconstruction of key policy texts. The discursive construction of ‘the nursery worker’ within government discourses has shifted over time but currently occupies a highly politicised position. It is argued that following a decade of unprecedented policy attention and reform, the cultivation and continued promotion of a discursive ‘crisis in childcare’, has laid the ground for Early Childhood Education and Care (ECEC) to be refashioned in particular ways. Policy claims to a perpetual ‘crisis in childcare’ are dismantled and explored in order to better understand how nursery workers have become fabricated through texts as more or less professional at particular political moments and to what effect. Attention is drawn to the recent introduction of ‘Early Years Professional Status’ and claims to evidence‐based policy formation are problematised. The paper concludes by considering the discursive opportunities available for alternative constructions of professionalism to take shape from within communities of ECEC practice.

Making sense of the glass ceiling in schools: an exploration of women teachers’ discourses

There is extensive evidence of a ‘glass ceiling’ for women across the labour market. Though schools have widely been described as ‘feminized’ work environments, the under‐representation of women at school management level is well established. Based on a study of women teachers’ careers and promotion in the English school sector (in early years, primary and secondary schools), this paper draws on a critical discourse analysis of 44 individual interviews conducted with women teachers to explore their views of the ‘glass ceiling’. Despite significant evidence of the barriers to management positions faced by women teachers, interpretative frameworks drawing on discourses of individualization and personal choice are most prominent among these to make sense of the low proportion of women in school management. However, the paper also identifies the existence of alternative discourses recognizing the existence of gender inequalities.

Who cares? The classed nature of childcare

In this paper I undertake a critical discourse analysis of the recent recruitment drive the Sure Start Unit has waged on Government web pages to encourage greater access to, and uptake of, careers in childcare. I argue that the messages inherent within the Sure Start Unit’s rhetoric are laden with classed notions about who should enter the childcare workforce. The simplistic and unproblematic presentation of several key issues are deconstructed and attention is drawn to the normative classed assumptions made about status, equal opportunities, pay and conditions and education and training which mask the reality of working in an unstable and poorly respected employment sector.

Putting posthumanist theory to work to reconfigure gender in early childhood: When theory becomes method becomes art

This article seeks to disrupt contemporary cultural imaginations about children and childhood; we offer some provocations to think differently about the regulation and governance of gender by taking a step back to consider children and childhoods more expansively and generatively, as becomings. Underpinning these concerns is the principal objective to explore ways in which posthumanist theorizing can be translated into posthumanist methodology through arts-based practice. In an attempt to illustrate how we have approached this we revisit several core onto-epistemological dilemmas posed by Lather (1993) when she asks: what counts as valid knowledge? Which then leads us onto ask what counts as data? What does data do? And what do we do with what the data does? By experimenting with a range of mediums (photography, artwork and poetry) ‘in a game of cat’s cradle’ (Haraway, 1994) we explore the potential that posthumanist approaches offer to extend and stretch the parameters that have come to shape established ways of knowing and becoming in early childhood.

Reimagining quality in early childhood

This special issue brings together a collection of rich, complex and challenging contributions that attempt to offer generative approaches to reconfigure what might constitute ‘quality’ within early years education. The issue came about from a shared concern about what Moss (this issue) refers to as the ‘gravitational pull’ of quality in early childhood education; debates about quality have existed for a considerable time and, despite rigorous critique, remain resolute. This issue aims to revisit and extend the groundbreaking work undertaken by Gunilla Dahlberg, Peter Moss and Alan Pence (1999, 2007) in Beyond Quality in Early Childhood Education and Care: Postmodern Perspectives and in the subsequent revised edition. In both texts, the authors made the astute observation that the concept and language of quality cannot accommodate issues such as diversity and multiple perspectives, contextual specificity and subjectivity. They argue that we must ‘go beyond the concept of quality’ (Dahlberg et al., 2007: 6) and, in so doing, suggest working with a new concept: ‘meaning making’. As noted by the authors:

Eu(rope): (Re)assembling, (Re)casting, and (Re)aligning Lines of De- and Re-territorialisation of Early Childhood

The aim of this paper is to (re)(e)value(ate) current micro- and macropolicies and politics that shape – and are shaped by – conceptualisations of and, in consequence, practices towards young children in a range of institutions/figurations. The ‘geopolitical’ location for our investigation is Europe, understood as conceptual space(s) as well as (geographical) territory. Whilst we begin by focusing attention on events within an English context, we nevertheless move beyond geographical boundaries. We argue that movements that are currently being undertaken in England are not individual activities. Rather, England is infected and affected by European and global histories, practices, policies, philosophies and epistemologies. We argue that it is the oscillations between different components within a broad European assemblage (human and nonhuman) that makes something happen. Subsequently, we detail and question whether ‘happenings’ that are occurring in England can be considered as possible creative openings where early childhood education/care could be reassembled ‘differently’.

‘Hard to Reach’ or Nomadic Resistance? Families ‘Choosing’ Not to Participate in Early Childhood Services

Taking seeming disinterest in early years music-making as its focal point, this article explores the Deleuzian notion of (affect)ive assemblages to consider the relationships between formal early childhood services, the familial home environment of the ‘hard to reach,’ and the use of populist musical resources. In drawing on post-structuralist and feminist theorisations of performance, subjectivity, language and meaning, the authors illustrate how discursive practices work at pathologising so that families are both contained and known within the nomenclature of ‘hard to reach’. The article then moves to work with a number of Deleuzian concepts, including ‘smooth/striated space’ as well as ‘nomad/nomadic’. In so doing, they illustrate nomadic resistance where new musical identities and affective relations between children, their families and musicality become possible for this elusive tribe. This article, understood as a rhizomatic journey, offers a conceptual stutter so as to destabilise dominant constructions about particular families. The lens of enquiry focuses upon the configuration of one white working-class family headed by a young single mother. In the English context, such parents have become routinely pathologised and labelled ‘Chav Mums’, yet this Deleuzoguattarian-inspired exploration seeks to offer a means of unsettling normative assumptions about family practices and the ‘becoming’ child within them, which will serve to inform social justice debates in other global contexts.