Megan L. Gibson

I Want to Educate School-Age Children: Producing Early Childhood Teacher Professional Identities.

The Australian governments current workforce reforms in early childhood education and care (ECEC) include a major shift in qualification requirements. The new requirement is that university four-year degree qualified teachers are employed in before-school contexts, including childcare. Ironically, recent research studies show that, in Australia, the very pre-service teachers who are enrolled in these degree programs have a reluctance to work in childcare. This article reports on part of a larger study which is inquiring into how early childhood teacher professional identities are discursively produced, and provides a partial mapping of the literature. One pre-service teachers comment provides the starting point, and the article locates some of the discourses that are accessible to pre-service teachers as they prepare for the early years workforce. An awareness of the discursive field provides a sound background for preparing early childhood teachers. A challenge for the field is to consider which discourses are dominant, and how they potentially work to privilege work in some ECEC contexts over others.

Governing child care in neoliberal times: Discursive constructions of children as economic units and early childhood educators as investment brokers

At any given time in the field of early childhood, there are discourses at play, producing images of children, and these ways of seeing children might be competing, colliding and/or complementing each other. It is fairly widely accepted that in many countries there are versions of dominant discourses that shape and are shaped by current practices in the field of early childhood. These include (1) romantic notions of children running free and connecting with nature and (2) the ‘Bart Simpson’ version of the naughty, cute or savage child, untamed and in need of civilising. These are far from being the only two discursive constructions of children present in current policies and practices. If early childhood professionals are to be active in shaping and implementing policies that affect their work and workforce, it is important that they are aware of the forces at play. In this article, we point to another powerful discourse at play in the Australian context of early childhood education, the image of children as economic units: investments in the future. We show how a ‘moment of arising’ in contemporary policy contexts, dominated by neoliberal principles of reform and competition, has charged early childhood educators in Australia with the duties of a ‘broker’, ensuring that young children are worth the investment. In this article, we begin with (1) a key policy document in early childhood education in Australia and examine the discursive affordances which shape the document. Next, (2) we pinpoint the shifts in how the work of child care is perceived by interrogating this key policy document through a methodology of discursive analysis. We then turn attention (3) to the work of this policy document along with other discourses which directly affect images of children and the shaping role these have on the work of educators. We conclude with (4) a consideration of how the work of early childhood professionals has come to be shaped by this economic discourse, and how they are being required to both work within the policy imperatives and likely to resist this new demand of them.

“Heroic victims”: Discursive constructions of preservice early childhood teacher professional identities

Government policies in Australia and in many other parts of the world, are calling for degree-qualified teachers to work in prior to formal school settings (center-based care, preschool). Yet, many preservice early childhood teachers assume they will end up teaching in primary schools. This paper examines the professional identities preservice early childhood teachers take up and speak into action while participating in classes focused on teaching in child care. Employing poststructural social theory, data drawn from focus groups with preservice early childhood teachers was examined through a Foucauldian-informed discourse analysis. Particular ways in which the preservice teachers talked about images of children and quality in early childhood are scrutinized for how discourses work to constitute the professional identities of preservice early childhood teachers. It was found that the participants drew on a range of competing discourses available to them, through their degree, and from elsewhere to describe the work of teaching young children and teaching in child care. These competing and colliding discourses, it is argued produce an identity of preservice teachers as ‘heroic victims.’ The paper raises questions about the discourses in circulation in preservice early childhood teacher education, and considers the implications this has for professional identities and career pathways—particularly work in child care.

Doing Social Justice in Early Childhood: The Potential of Leadership.

Early childhood education has long been connected with objectives related to social justice. Australian early childhood education and care (ECEC) has its roots in philanthropic and educational reform movements prevalent at the turn of the twentieth century. More recently, with the introduction of the National Early Childhood Reform Agenda, early childhood education has once more been linked to the achievement of aims associated with redressing inequality and disadvantage. The authors argue that educational leaders have an obligation to promote equity as they articulate the needs of marginalised students who are traditionally disadvantaged while they also work towards challenging the social order that affords this circumstance of inequity to exist. Drawing on extant literature, including data from two previously reported Australian studies in which leadership emerged as having a transformational impact on service delivery, this article examines the potential of early childhood leadership to generate ‘socially just’ educational communities. With reference to critical theory, the authors argue that critically informed, intentional and strategic organisational leadership can play a pivotal role in creating changed circumstances and opportunities for children and families. Such leadership includes positional and distributed elements, articulation of values and beliefs, and collective action that is mindful and informed.

Understanding who cares: creating the evidence to address the long-standing policy problem of staff shortages in early childhood education and care

Evidence-based policy is a means of ensuring that policy is informed by more than ideology or expedience. However, what constitutes robust evidence is highly contested. In this paper, we argue policy must draw on quantitative and qualitative data. We do this in relation to a long entrenched problem in Australian early childhood education and care (ECEC) workforce policy. A critical shortage of qualified staff threatens the attainment of broader child and family policy objectives linked to the provision of ECEC and has not been successfully addressed by initiatives to date. We establish some of the limitations of existing quantitative data sets and consider the potential of qualitative studies to inform ECEC workforce policy. The adoption of both quantitative and qualitative methods is needed to illuminate the complex nature of the work undertaken by early childhood educators, as well as the environmental factors that sustain job satisfaction in a demanding and poorly understood working environment.

Leadership for creating cultures of sustainability

Editor’S Note. In this chapter, Megan Gibson discusses the vital role of leadership in creating change for sustainability in an early childhood education and care setting. As the past Director of Campus Kindergarten, a long-day care centre that has had a Sustainable Planet Project for over a decade, she draws on her personal experiences and perspectives and the theoretical underpinnings that helped to shape her work as an innovative leader and a leader of innovation. Megan discusses the four frames of leadership, organisational culture, professional development and organisational change and their contributions to creating, and shaping the Sustainable Planet Project. She emphasises that the style of educational and organisational leadership plays an essential role in creating a culture of sustainability. There is emphasis on ‘whole settings’ approaches to change and the creation of ‘learning communities’ for sustainable living. The recognition of children as leaders and change agents for sustainability is highlighted. To our children’s children. The glad tomorrow. by Oodgeroo Noonuccal. (formerly Kath Walker, 1970, p. 40). AN OPPORTUNITY TO LEAD FOR EFS. For close to a decade I had the opportunity to work within the Campus Kindergarten community, a unique place for children, families and teachers. A key interest and focus on the environment during this time led to the development of the Sustainable Planet Project. From its inception at a staff professional development retreat, this project permeated the everyday ‘lifeworld’ (Sergiovanni 2003, p. 16) at the centre. The Sustainable Planet Project was actively embraced by people from within this early childhood community, and has grown and evolved. […].

Re-Thinking Discourse of Teacher Professionalism in Early Childhood Education: An Australian Perspective

The professionalism of early childhood teachers has been the subject of increasing attention globally for over a decade (Moss in Contemporary Issues in Early Childhood, 7(1), 30–41 2006; Osgood Narratives from the nursery: Negotiating professional identities in early childhood. Oxon, UK: Routledge 2012; Urban in Professionalism in early childhood education and care: International perspectives. Oxon, UK: Routledge 2010). While understandings of professionalism have often been harnessed to discourses of quality in early childhood research literature (Urban in Quality, autonomy and the profession: Questions of quality. Dublin, Ireland: Centre for Early Childhood Development and Education 2004; Penn Quality in early childhood services: An international perspective. Berkshire, UK: Open University Press 2011), there has also been increasing attention to the ways discourses (based on the work of French philosopher Michel Foucault) produce understandings of being professional, becoming professional and constructing professionalism. Foucault (The archaeology of knowledge (A. M. Sheridan Smith Trans.). London, UK: Routledge 1972/1989) conceptualised discourses as ways of speaking, thinking or understanding that come to be accepted as truths. This means that discourses regulate possibilities for what can be spoken, thought or understood.