Professionalisation of early childhood education and care practitioners: Working conditions in Ireland

Abstract

The last decade has revealed a global (re)configuring of the relationships between the state, society and educational settings in the direction of systems of performance management. In this article, the authors conduct a critical feminist inquiry into this changing relationship in relation to the professionalisation of early childhood education and care practitioners in Ireland, with a focus on dilemmatic contradictions between the policy reform ensemble and practitioners’ reported working conditions in a doctoral study. The critique draws from the politics of power and education, and gendered and classed subjectivities, and allows the authors to theorise early childhood education and care professionalisation in alternative emancipatory ways for democratic pedagogy rather than a limited performativity. The findings reveal the state (re)configured as a central command centre with an over-reliance on surveillance, alongside deficits of responsibility for public interest values in relation to the working conditions of early childhood education and care workers, who are mostly part-time ‘pink-collar’ women workers in precarious roles. The study has implications that go beyond Ireland for the professionalisation of early childhood education and care workers and meeting the early developmental needs of young children.

Children and Practitioners as Truth Seekers and Truth Tellers: Innovative, Counter-Hegemonic Approaches to Evaluating National Inclusion Policies

“…The aim was to achieve a counter-hegemonic research process that challenged existing power distributions in ways that validated the child as a knower of truth, and Practitioner Researchers (PRs) as experts whose relational proficiencies were rightly recognised as relevant to research about inclusion [21,24]. This was in a context where the ECCE workforce had been feminised [17] and, consequently, its expert status denied [20,21] with implications for pay and status [18,22]. In relation to Q2 (practices used in the research), PRs were to deploy a multi-modal mapping method [27,28], selected because of its potential for eliciting children's lived experiences of inclusion, and making abstract concepts that unfold in the social world such as inclusion material [30] in ways that had meaning for children [31] and could be interpreted.…”

“…Feminisation is also manifested in the way that the expertise of the ECCE workforce is diminished, devalued, or overlooked. Dominant constructions of the ECCE professional as a 'caregiver' and 'childcare worker' have contributed to this situation [20]. This is because 'childcare' discourses reproduce the assumption that the task can be performed by any layperson and indeed, any laywoman.…”

“As Uploaders, We Have the Responsibility”: Individualized Professionalization of Bilibili Uploaders

“…A study of care practitioners of early childhood in Ireland demonstrated that while the state sets top-down regulations and carries out inspections to make practitioners qualified, the participants' job titles and responsibilities show neither clarity nor coherence and that these educators have few chances for further education and development [51]. Wilensky observed that pre-existing power-structures, such as organizational pushes in the form of professional associations, often coming before the formation of technical and institutional bases, could become barriers to the "natural history of professionalism" [70].…”

Impact of Learning From Home: Cognitive Development of Early Childhood Education Student in Pandemic Covid – 19

“…The learning process in early childhood education institutions is generally done faceto-face in the classroom (Miranda & da Costa Lins, 2021). This is because in the early childhood learning process they still need direct teacher guidance, because the teacher is the executor as well as the guide for the learning process in the classroom (Mooney Simmie & Murphy, 2021). In addition, Teachers can more easily instruct kids directly by engaging in direct learning in the classroom.…”