Constructing Professional Identities in Chilean Early Childhood Education

This research examines the construction of professional identities among early childhood (EC) educators in Chile through a poststructural and feminist approach. Although early childhood education and care (ECEC) has traditionally been undermined as a professional practice due to its gendered and classed nature, increasingly the literature has acknowledged the relevance, complexity and situatedness of ECEC practice. Consequently, there has been unprecedented concern about the need to professionalise this practice. This has situated educators in a paradoxical position, where they need to permanently negotiate their identity between complying with the professional standards that promote a managerial form of professionalism while maintaining the caring dimension of ECEC practice. It is in this tension that this research emerges to understand how educators negotiate the multiple and contradictory dimensions of their practice and make sense of their professional role in education and society. In Chile this tension is especially interesting as, although to become and work as an EC educator requires one to hold a professional degree, concerns about professionalising this workforce are increasingly driving the public agenda. Drawing on Foucault’s work on discourse, power/knowledge and subjectivity, as well as Butler’s concepts of gender performativity and discursive agency, this thesis explores how a group of 54 Chilean EC educators construct, resist and negotiate their professional identities within the hegemonic discourses surrounding ECEC professionalism. This theoretical framework allows the researcher to challenge what is taken as certain to expose the complex, contradictory and constantly shifting dynamics of professional subjectivation and opens the possibility for transformation and reconstructing alternative ways of practicing ECEC education. Findings from this research suggest that the deeply emotional engagement of EC educators in making sense of their professionalism and points to the ways in which dominant discourses have increasingly co-opted these ethics of care narratives. This thesis makes an important contribution to the growing literature and adds situated complexity to conceptualisation of early years professionalism in the global South, within the context of Chile