Gaining professional recognition: exploring professionality and professional identity of early years practitioners in higher education

Abstract

Professionalisation of the early years workforce internationally foregrounds what it means to gain professional recognition as an early years practitioner and has important implications for developing vocational programmes in higher education. This article explores two early years practitioners' professionality and developing professional identities as they undertook a new undergraduate degree programme whilst employed full-time in UK early childhood settings. Using the practitioners' learning stories and insights from their managers and mentors, this article examines evidence for changes in their professional identities; illustrates how they used their learning in practice; and identifies learning about their professionality. Significantly, it contributes to the understanding of professional identity, professionality and professionalism of early years practitioners and questions whether 'threshold concepts', after Meyer and Land, differ depending on students' prior experience of practice. The findings inform understandings of the way higher education programmes can enable practitioners to develop themselves and contribute to their profession.

Analysis of anxiety levels and attitudes of nursing students toward the nursing profession during the COVID‐19 pandemic

“…Strong professional identities and attitudes of the members of a vocation are important for an occupation to reach specialist status and to provide quality service to society. With the establishment of professional attitude for the profession among nurses, positive effects are expected, such as an increase in the quality of healthcare services and ensuring professional unity and status 17 …”

“…The attitudes of nurses in different situations can be sometimes positive and sometimes negative and thus vary constantly 19,20 . These professional attitudes, which vary all the time, are the most crucial indicators of professional success 17 . During the pandemic, the positive attitudes of nursing students who have just started the profession will also have a positive effect on factors regarding the profession.…”

Using agential morphogenesis to track professional identity development in higher education

“…However, these issues are not limited to this context. A survey of the scholarly literature regarding PID in higher education shows that this is an ongoing global, cross-discipline concern (see, for example, Mahon, et al, 2020;Hardy, 2020;Dickerson and Trodd, 2020).…”