ABSTRACT
As highlighted in earlier chapters, the notion of professionalism in the early years has become a central concern to a range of key actors. I have demonstrated the importance attached to ‘professionalism’ for policy makers, nursery staff and managers, others working with children, and parents/mothers. This sustained interest has attracted considerable media attention, which in turn has acted to promote/fuel hegemonic public discourses that then contribute to a construction of nursery staff in particularly narrow ways. My aim is to bring together a number of the issues raised in preceding chapters to further explore the complexities of doing professionalism/being professional in a highly gendered and devalued employment sector. From the time that I began this study (2003), the terminology used to describe members of the early years workforce, and the concomitant career development pathways and opportunities, has altered considerably (which is reflected in my varying reference to the participants in this study as nursery workers, practitioners, childcarers, early years educators and so on). In Chapter 4 I endeavoured to deconstruct and problematise the labels that are applied to those working in nurseries and the symbolic meanings attached which construct members of a workforce in certain ways at different times. This refashioning of the ‘nursery worker’ stemmed from widespread acknowledgement that there was confusion around precisely what ECEC encompassed, and who comprised the workforce (DfES, 2005; Moss, 2006). This ambiguity provided justification for reform (through processes of top-down professionalisation) of a hitherto fragmented/ heterogeneous workforce. Introduced in 2005, the Children’s Workforce Development Council (CWDC) had, as part of its central mission, the explicit aim to create order and clarity where there had been confusion, duplication and ambiguity surrounding career structures and pathways available in ECEC (www.cwdcouncil.org.uk). A key aspect to this reform agenda was the application of appropriate labels/job titles and the establishment of a clear hierarchy in the quest to achieve a graduateled profession of the future. In 2007, the ‘Early Years Professional’ became a credentialised status that could be conferred upon nursery workers (and others working with young children in ECEC) through formal accreditation. This
marked a significant moment in the field of ECEC whereby being ‘professional’ or having ‘professional status’ was an accolade that could be attained through evidence of demonstrating a series of competencies. The ongoing policy reform in ECEC workforce remodelling demonstrates a commitment to a particular form of professionalism, which I argue foregrounds a neo-liberal, technicist approach in which individuals must perform ‘professionalism’ against an external set of criteria by which they will be judged (Mahony and Hextall, 2000; Osgood, 2006c). A number of international scholars, such as Cannella (1997); Goodfellow (2004), Dahlberg and Moss (2005); Kilderry (2006); Fenech and Sumsion (2007), wrestle with precisely what professionalism in ECEC can/does and should look like. Leading to this piece of work, I too have invested considerable time in exploring what is meant by ‘professionalism’, and in contemplating the related contradictions and ambivalences when the application of hegemonic discourses come to play out in localised sites and on individual subjecthoods (Osgood, 2004, 2005, 2006a, 2006b, 2006c, 2008). I have previously argued that neo-liberal discourses promote a form of professionalism that foregrounds masculinist values and cultures, a position supported by other commentators (Acker, 1995; Hearn and Parkin, 2001; Reay and Ball, 2000). As a highly gendered employment sector strongly associated with the affective realms of caring and nurturance, ECEC becomes understood as lacking in professionalism precisely because it is deemed hyper-feminine. The participants in this study wrestled with the gendered discourses surrounding the nature of their work and the consequences of this for its discursive positioning as lacking in professionalism. Yet they were also staunchly defensive of the emotionality and necessarily affective nature of the work that they do which they regarded as being central to their identity as working professionally with children (and their families). It is evident that a desire to be constructed in public discourse as professional is fraught with tensions, contradictions and ambiguities. This is further complicated when nursery workers invest in a sense of moral righteousness and by embodying and performing emotionality in their work. I revisit and develop earlier theorisations of professionalism offered from within the academic community. Further, my aim is to draw upon the analyses offered in Chapters 5 and 6 to map the salience of discourses around ‘imagined childhood’ and ‘othered-mothering’ onto hegemonic constructions of the professional nursery worker. By doing this I am endeavouring to unearth and explore the tensions between policy formation/application and the subjective experiences involved in ‘being professional’ and doing professionalism in the nursery.
