Feeling like ‘the ham of the sandwich’: The contested professional identities of school-based early childhood educators in Chile

Abstract

Present-day early childhood educators face the challenge of producing their professional identities in highly neo-liberal contexts, negotiating contested discourses on professionalism, education quality and the overall purpose of early childhood education. While it has been suggested by critical scholarship that the early childhood workforce responds to these challenges by developing a unified professional identity, the author contends that particular contexts of practice (such as schools) and the schoolification of early childhood education may produce fragmentation within the workforce. This is crystallised in the figure of the school-based early childhood educator, whose professional practice lies somewhere between that of a kindergarten educator and a schoolteacher. As school-based early childhood education is not perceived as proper early childhood practice by kindergarten educators, school-based educators struggle to identify with this group of practitioners. Drawing on a psychoanalytically informed qualitative study with early childhood educators, the author discusses some of these tensions and proposes the notion of liminal identity (an intermediate space of becoming where identities – among other possibilities – may be examined and reimagined) as a starting point for the exploration of this emergent type of professional subjectivity in the context of an increasing provision of early childhood education in school settings. The author calls for a destabilisation of oversimplified understandings of the relation between educators and their contexts of practice, and the acknowledgement that educators experience and respond to the struggles of the profession in diverse and complex ways.