“Heroic Victims”: Discursive Constructions of Early Childhood Teacher Professional Identities

• In Event: Roundtable Session 7
  In Roundtable Session: Who in the World Are We? Deconstructing Identities in Early Childhood Education

Abstract

This paper represents part of a larger study that was an inquiry into early childhood workforce reforms in Australia. One major reform is the qualification requirements that call for university four-year degree-qualified teachers to be employed in child care. The study employs a particular method of discourse analysis, to examine policy documents and the talk of preservice teachers. Ironic categories are proposed that hold seemingly opposing ideas together in tension, where both ways of seeing are necessary and both are true. For instance, early childhood professionals are both heroes and victims – “heroic victims”. The paper offers new ways of thinking about how policy and preservice teacher education work to produce early childhood teacher professional identities.

Author

• Megan Gibson, Queensland University of Technology