In this collective article, the authors explore constructions of early childhood practitioners and how they disconnect and reconnect in a global neo-liberal education policy context. The contributions to the conversation provide windows into shifting professional identities across five national contexts: New Zealand, the USA, Ireland, Australia and Denmark. The authors ask who benefits from the notion of distinct professional identities, linked to early childhood education as locally and culturally embedded practice. They conceptualize teachers’ shifting subjectivities, drawing on Kristeva’s philosophical conception of identity as constantly in construction, open and evolving. Arguments for the urgency to counter the global uniformity machine, streamlined curricula, standardized assessment and deprofessionalization are not new. However, the authors wonder whether these arguments are missing something. Does our localized and highly contextualized identity construction enable ‘divide and rule’ politics by global agents such as the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, World Bank and international corporations? The authors’ (preliminary) answer is to build individual and collective professional identities that are grounded in diverse local contexts and in a broader transnational professional (political) consciousness and collective voice.

This article discusses recent policy developments in Europe regarding Roma and Traveller integration and Early Childhood Provision. After a long history of oppression, Roma issues have recently become prominent on the EU policy agenda. The article discusses how these relate to developments in other areas of policy: the European children's rights agenda and the recognition that early childhood education and care is a key policy tool to combat social exclusion. It gives background information on Roma and Travellers in Europe and discusses the consequences of subsuming the various communities under one umbrella term: Roma. The EU Commission is concerned with responses from Member States to the European Framework for National Roma Integration Strategies. The article argues that in order to address Roma children's experience from a holistic perspective, social justice and equality need to be key elements of early childhood education and care provision and training. The European policy developments that frame the article are examined from a local vantage point: the experiences of Traveller and Roma children in Ireland and the Irish Preschool Education Initiative for Children from Minority Communities.

Problematic policy constructions of the purpose of education implicate professional identities and working conditions of professionals working with the youngest children. This paper builds on our earlier writing, to contest teacher professional identities in Australia, Ireland, Denmark and the United States of America, to illustrate the crucial importance of contextualised policy landscapes in early childhood education and care. It uses prevailing policy constructions, power imbalances and tensions in defining teacher identities, to ask crucial questions, such as what has become of the professional ‘self’. It questions the fundamental ethics of care and encounter, and of worthy wage and other campaigns focused on the well-being of teachers when faced with a world-wide crisis. The cross-national conversations culminate in a contemporary confrontation of teacher identity and imperatives in increasingly uncertain times as evolving in light of the COVID-19 pandemic.

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