Learning how to do up buttons: Professionalism, teacher identity and bureaucratic subjectivities in early years settings

Abstract

Early years education in Europe and elsewhere around the world is currently in the spotlight due to political and economical changes and subsequent promises of effective investment into its provision. In this article we analyse everyday preschool practices in Slovakia in terms of tensions between policies, the teachers workforce and the concept of professionalism. Through bureaucratic scientisation, teachers become subjects with bureaucratic subjectivities, and they are expected to devote increasing amounts of time to planning, reporting and administrative tasks. Teachers are decreasingly focused on the actual work on the ground with the children, and are concerned instead with notions of accountability and reporting, which supposedly raises their professional status. Slovakia's experience of the bureaucratic subjectivities of early years teachers has complex ramifications for European and overseas countries as it problematises and unmasks the global issues of complex tensions between the teachers and policy documents.

‘Too young to read’: early years practitioners’ perceptions of early reading with under-threes

“…This tension and conflict may relate to the early years practitioners' own professional identities (Osgood 2006(Osgood , 2012Manning-Morton 2006;McDowall Clark and Baylis 2012). In fact, Pupala, Kascak and Tesar (2016) propose that this is a 'contemporary' (p. 656) viewpoint, suggesting that there are now many 'new educational challenges and criteria that early years education is increasingly expected to fulfil' (p. 656). However, early reading has not usually been described as a 'new educational challenge', given that reading stories and sharing books from birth onwards has already been well documented by researchers (Clark 2014; Elkin 2014).…”

Teachers’ voice, power and agency: (un)professionalisation of the early years workforce

“…As a further protection of contributor identities, all names and settings have been altered, so the quotes do not identify particular individuals, settings or localities. These complexities have also been explored elsewhere (Pupala, Kascak, and Tesar 2016).…”

Europe's Twists and Turns in Teacher Education

“…It is a burden that threatens their identity and is felt to be a departure from their original role, which they see as participation in children's learning. (It is not necessarily like this, though, as some of our research has shown that teachers incorporate bureaucratic tasks into their professional identity and consider the successful handling of bureaucracy to be a mark of their identity) [6].…”