Segments and stutters: Early Years Teachers and Becoming-Professional

There has been extensive research and analysis of the professionalization of early childhood educators/teachers (Colley, 2006; Grieshaber and Canella, 2001; Osgood, 2006, 2009, 2010 2012; McGillivray, 2011). The recent promotion of a teacher-led workforce in England has further focused discussions on the modelling of early years teachers as professionals. In this paper I develop an alternative analysis through the concepts of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari to explore professionalization as a process of becoming. English policy focus has been on constituting early years teachers as reflective and rational subjects developing towards a more narrow view of professional identity where school ready discourses are prevalent (Fairchild, 2015). My research with early years teachers reveals a complex negotiation and interchange with the demands of professional identity. This is analysed through Deleuze and Guattari’s concepts of segmentation, to refer to the forms of power which order the early years teachers’ professional identity, and stuttering, to develop the forms of resistance and negotiation that suggest a more fluid model of becoming. In particular, my analysis focuses on how this stuttering opens-up beyond the limits of a discourse analysis to suggest the embodied and material forms of practice that are central to early years teaching. This methodology allows us to move beyond ‘the mind-matter and culture-nature divides of transcendental humanist thought’ (Van der Tuin and Dolphijn, 2010: 155), towards a politics of possibility (Otterstad and Reinertsen, 2015), in which the emerging early years teacher is engaged with an embodied and material world