How do Early Years Educators Sustain and Define their Professionalism? A Methodological Approach to Eliciting Early Years Educators’ Thinking

This research has been concerned with eliciting the voices and thinking of a group of early years’ educators across three Local Education Authorities in West Yorkshire.The early years of education require a reflective, articulate and highly qualified workforce. The ability to reflect on and evaluate practice, prescription and one’s own thoughts about it must be the key to professionalism in the early years.The objective of this research was to extrapolate the thinking of a small group of EYEs across three local education authorities (LEAs) in West Yorkshire. The methodology of eliciting teacher thinking was employed to gain access to their voices and discover what were their critical issues and interests, their professional and practical knowledge.Rather than directing the participants to responding to specific aspects, the research was conducted to enable them to demonstrate any areas of interest and critical issues arising from their professional roles.‘Teacher thinking’ is an effective methodology to determine the thinking and knowledge of experienced and complex professionals working in a variety of settings. This empirical research was undertaken to elicit educators' perspectives to determine their own understandings, with accounts in their own terms through in-depth open-ended interviews, questionnaires, personal/professional time-lines, video-reflective interviews on practice and focus group interviews. These varied different data collection strategies are key to the research as they elicited holistic and varied perspectives on the early years educators professionalism. The aim was to give early years educators a voice, promote recognition of the complexity of the phenomena to be studied and determine the most effective method of eliciting their thinking. This article presents the methodology and findings from this research - how have this group of EYEs sustained and defined their professionalism?