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For increasing numbers of Australian children, childcare is part of their everyday experiences. The marketisation and corporatisation of education have been under discussion for some time, particularly in relation to schooling. There has been comparatively little public scrutiny of how this trend might impact on, and shape Early Childhood Education and Care (ECEC). This article explores the existing and potential impacts of privatisation and corporatisation of ECEC in terms of how these constrain and are reshaping the vision and the practice of what is done for children in the prior-to-school sector.

There have been a number of recent developments impacting on the field of early childhood education that suggest it might be timely to reexamine our understandings of children and childhood. Events such as the development of mandated curriculum for the non-compulsory years, the implementation of diagnostic tools and assessment regimes in the first years of school and moral panic over paedophilia are all underpinned by certain views of the child and ideals of childhood. This article explores how three dominant constructions of the child embedded in early childhood policy and practice are problematic, particularly in terms of power relationships and agency for the child and how they may constrain the possibilities in early childhood curriculum. The analysis concludes that taking a critical perspective on these childhood images helps reveal hidden assumptions and creates an opportunity for new kinds of images that offer alternative positions to the child as an active social agent and reorient early childhood curriculum towards its transformational possibilities.

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In Australia, as elsewhere, many factors have contributed to making the struggle for recognition of the professional status of early childhood difficult and ongoing. Arguably this has led to instabilities surrounding professional identity and how members of the field regard themselves and their work. The development and release of the Early Years Learning Framework for Australia (EYLF) was perceived by many as an opportunity to raise the status and standing of the early childhood professional within the early childhood field itself and in the wider community. The EYLF positions all those who work directly with children in early childhood settings as 'educators', and sets out the expectations for children's learning and what educators can do to promote that learning. In doing so, the EYLF produces, reproduces and circulates both new and familiar discourses of early childhood education. In this article, the authors draw on research capturing the perceptions of the early childhood practitioners who took part in the trial of the EYLF across Australia in 2009 to investigate whether and how curriculum interventions such as the EYLF have the potential to shape/reshape early childhood professional identity. Utilising the concepts of discourse, subjectivity, power-knowledge and agency, the authors explore the possibilities and dangers of the construction of an early childhood professional identity in and through the EYLF.