Being a graduate professional in the field of Early Childhood Education and Care: silence, submission and subversion

Abstract

Recent workforce reform in England has sought to increase opportunities for practitioners who work outside the maintained (school) sector to gain graduate status. Whilst these opportunities have generally been welcomed within the sector, this has created dichotomous tensions for the ECEC workforce. The traditional construction of the ECEC practitioner assumes a lack of educational and social capital (Osgood, 2009). Its associated dispositions do not necessarily fit with the alternative construct of the Early Years Professional or Teacher who, through gaining educational capital in the form of a university degree, will be sufficiently equipped to enact the normative and performative discourses which dominate educational and social policy. These tensions serve as the focus for this study, which was concerned with examining how a group of graduate practitioners were endeavouring to broker their competing professional constructs within their own workplace. The research argues for the necessity to establish professional, relational spaces within and across the field of Early Years Education and Care in order to have a greater understanding of the value that all early years professionals can contribute to pedagogical practice.

What is it that we still don’t get? – Relational pedagogy and why relationships and connections matter in early childhood

“…Within policy-based ECEC provision, a second practice tension emerges to challenge a commitment to relational pedagogy (Basford, 2019:867). Relational pedagogy inherently seeks to acknowledge the importance of relationships and present-child interactions, encounters and experiences in early learning (Hayes and Filipovic, 2018: 224); however, ECEC practice is bound within epistemological positions founded in cognition, developmentally appropriate practice and developmental psychology (Moss and Cameron, 2020).…”