Marianne Fenech

Promoting Early Childhood Teacher Professionalism in the Australian Context: The Place of Resistance

The early childhood education (ECE) sector in Australia is marked by a habitus where ‘professionalism’ is confined to objective, technical practices. The authos suggest that this is a diminished view of professionalism, and one that compromises high-quality ECE. This article is concerned with how teacher professionalism can be re-imagined and practised within an ECE setting in ways that uphold childrens rights and interests and emancipate early childhood teachers from technical, deprofessionalising constraints. Through a case study of professionalism in a reputable high-quality long-day-care centre in Sydney, Australia, the article extends thinking about teacher activism and promotes resistance-based professionalism as one way of producing an alternative habitus about quality ECE and the integral role early childhood teachers play in such provision.

Regulation and risk: early childhood education and care services as sites where the ‘laugh of Foucault’ resounds

This article problematises the construction of regulation as an effective manager of risks to children in early childhood education and care (ECEC) services. Adopting a Foucaldian, governmentalist approach to regulation and risk, the authors suggest that governments in Australia have ‘risk colonised’ regulation to meet their own interests rather than make effective use of regulation as a mechanism for quality assurance. They propose that the risk colonising of regulation has not effectively addressed societal risks to children in ECEC services, and has generated its own risks to quality standards through a preoccupation with institutional risk. In these ways, ‘the laugh of Foucault’ resounds in the regulation of ECEC services.

Far from Ideal: Everyday Experiences of Mothers and Early Childhood Professionals Negotiating an Inclusive Early Childhood Experience in the Australian Context.

Using narrative interviews underpinned by an ecocultural framework, this Australian study investigated the experiences of 39 mothers of children with disabilities and 27 staff members from the early childhood services which these children attended. The data highlight serious limitations of current government policy and provisions in Australia to facilitating the inclusion of children with disabilities into mainstream childrens services. The small number of successful inclusions evident in this study appears to be in spite of current government policy and may be attributed more to staff personnel. This article concludes by calling for policy change that actively facilitates the successful inclusion of children with disabilities into generalist early childhood services.

More than a Shortage of Early Childhood Teachers: Looking beyond the Recruitment of University Qualified Teachers to Promote Quality Early Childhood Education and Care.

In Australia and internationally, government policies aim to increase the supply of early childhood teachers and thus improve the quality of early childhood education and care services. In this paper, we suggest that such a policy-quality trajectory in Australia is not as straightforward as policy discourses suggest. From industrial relations and broader policy contexts, we argue that the early childhood profession is a profession on the margins and that this marginalisation complicates efforts to enhance numbers of early childhood teachers. Mindful of this marginalisation, we draw upon preliminary findings from a study exploring the motivations, beliefs and expectations of mature age postgraduate students to highlight practical issues pertaining to students and early childhood teacher education programs that further complicate policy drives to increase the supply of early childhood teachers. We propose that the success of such policy drives is dependent on a comprehensive addressing of the complexities raised in this paper.

The regulatory environment: A source of job (dis)satisfaction for early childhood professionals?

This article extends current understandings of sources of job (dis)satisfaction for childcare staff by investigating the hypothesis that early childhood professionals’ satisfaction with regulatory requirements is a predictor of job satisfaction. Findings show that for early childhood professionals in New South Wales, Australia, satisfaction with the regulatory environment is related to the extent these requirements are perceived to support autonomous professional practices conducive to quality care. Considerable dissatisfaction with regulatory requirements was found among study participants. Nonetheless, this level of dissatisfaction did not predict job (dis)satisfaction. The lack of correlation may be indicative of the study’s sample, however, and does not preclude a greater connection between the two constructs. Implications of a possible nexus between job satisfaction and satisfaction with regulatory requirements are discussed, and further research is called for.

Identifying high-quality centre-based childcare using quantitative data-sets : what the numbers do and don't tell us

Abstract Quantitative approaches to defining and measuring quality in early childhood education and care (ECEC) have provided a key platform for policy development. Yet their strengths and limitations as informants of high-quality ECEC have not been tested. In this study we examine two sources of quantitative data collected over a five-year period for 74 long day care centres: (1) the Early Childhood Environment Rating Scale-Revised and Infant-Toddler Environment Rating Scale instruments which are well-established observational measures; and (2) Australias nationally administered Quality Improvement and Accreditation System which involves a self-study and validation process. Correspondence over time and across measures was more consistent for the centres identified as providing lower quality ECEC. Variability in ratings of quality was more evident in lower quality centres, whereas high-quality centres showed less variability over time. High quality, however, was less consistently identified across measures. Discussion focuses on the strengths and limitations of these measures of quality, and the implications these have for policy development and future research.

Working by the rules : early childhood professionals' perceptions of regulatory requirements

The regulatory environment in which long daycare centres are required to operate plays a key role in determining what early childhood professionals do and how they go about doing it. This paper reports findings from a state‐wide survey undertaken in New South Wales, Australia, which shows how early childhood professionals position themselves on four key aspects of the regulatory environment: the premises underlying regulatory requirements; its perceived support of them as professionals to provide quality care; how state regulations and the national accreditation system impact upon their daily practice; and the way these audit systems affect their professional esteem. Implications for job satisfaction are discussed. The paper concludes by asserting that regulatory requirements need to be evaluated in terms of their contribution to structural, process, contextual and work environment dimensions of quality.

Systems advocacy in the professional practice of early childhood teachers: from the antithetical to the ethical

Abstract Dominant constructions of professionalism in early childhood education can diminish early childhood teachers’ and educators’ undertaking of advocacy at the systems or political level. In this paper, we propose an ethically grounded construction of professionalism that provides space for professional practice to move beyond the classroom and into the political sphere. Findings from interviews with four early childhood teachers from Australia who undertake systems advocacy as part of their professional practice show that this work is driven by ethical influences that extend beyond the rule-based imperative, in ethical codes, that teachers should undertake systems advocacy. Findings highlight the value of considering systems advocacy as practice that emerges from an interplay of three theoretical foundations of ethics: deontology, utilitarianism and virtue ethics. Implications for teacher professionalism and the building of a teacher disposition that incorporates systems advocacy are considered.

The representation of the national quality framework in the australian print media: silences and slants in the mediatisation of early childhood education policy

ABSTRACT While research investigating the mediatisation of education policy has primarily been undertaken in school contexts, this paper reports on a study conducted in the context of early childhood education. The paper examines how a major policy in early childhood education in Australia – the National Quality Framework – has been mediatised in selected newspapers. Drawing on Foucauldian, critical discourse analysis and mediatisation theorising, we utilised the corpus linguistic tools of WordSmith Tools 6.0 to inform content analyses of 121 articles from two major media corporations, News Corp and Fairfax. Our findings highlight the utility of treating our data as two distinct corpora, with each corporation found to have utilised discursive technologies to proffer competing positionings of the Framework. The contested nature of the Framework – generally purported in Fairfax to be a tool that supports quality early education, as opposed to News Corp’s framing of the policy as one that inhibits affordable childcare – poses implications for which advocacy groups are regarded by the media as having authority and thus likely to influence policy through the reporting of their voices. Implications for newspaper media as a discursive influence on parents’ childcare decision-making are also considered.