What is it about?
Do graduate early years practitioners see themselves as professionals with specialist knowledge and higher status or do their construct their professional identity in terms of their relationships with children, families and colleagues. How can they be supported to claim professional recognition for their role?
Featured Image
Why is it important?
There is increasing pressure on the early years sector in England to ensure children are 'made ready' for formal schooling, so that educational outcomes can be improved. However, the status and recognition given to the practitioners expected to achieve this, particularly for those with graduate level qualifications is a contested issue, with many of them on very low status, with little recognition for the specialist knowledge they apply in their roles.
Perspectives
This article argues that in valuing care and relationships as the core of their role, early years practitioners risk limiting their voice in articulating their identity, and present a discourse of care in early years practice as a gendered and dispositional attribute rather than a pedagogic strategy. Professional education for practitioners needs to address this if they are to gain higher professional recognition.
Mrs Mary A Dyer
University of Huddersfield
Read the Original
This page is a summary of: Being a professional or practising professionally, European Early Childhood Education Research Journal, April 2018, Taylor & Francis,
DOI: 10.1080/1350293x.2018.1462999.
You can read the full text:
Contributors
The following have contributed to this page
