‘I Want to Educate School-Age Children’: Producing Early Childhood Teacher Professional Identities

The Australian government's current workforce reforms in early childhood education and care (ECEC) include a major shift in qualification requirements. The new requirement is that university four-year degree qualified teachers are employed in before-school contexts, including childcare. Ironically, recent research studies show that, in Australia, the very pre-service teachers who are enrolled in these degree programs have a reluctance to work in childcare. This article reports on part of a larger study which is inquiring into how early childhood teacher professional identities are discursively produced, and provides a partial mapping of the literature. One pre-service teacher's comment provides the starting point, and the article locates some of the discourses that are accessible to pre-service teachers as they prepare for the early years workforce. An awareness of the discursive field provides a sound background for preparing early childhood teachers. A challenge for the field is to consider which discourses are dominant, and how they potentially work to privilege work in some ECEC contexts over others.