Rhetoric-Reality Contradictions: The Discursive Positioning of Early Childhood Education and Care Practitioners in Ireland

• In Event: Marriott Roundtable Session 5
  In Roundtable Session: Alliance of Critical Educators and Researchers

Abstract

In the last decade, Early Childhood Education and Care (ECEC) has taken on a new importance in the global policy agenda based on human capital. This rhetoric prioritises the professionalization of ECEC workers using reductionist discourses of quality and effectiveness (Urban, 2008). The critical interpretivist doctoral study reported here examines the contradictions, tensions and transformative possibilities in the current discursive positioning of ECEC practitioners. The study recognises the need to ‘critically read the world’ (Freire, 1970; McLaren, 2015) and misalignments between the rhetoric of ECEC reforms and the lived reality for practitioners. The study draws on theoretical frameworks of Bernstein (2000) Foucault (1991) and Apple (2012) to grasp the complexities of discursive positioning, power and agency underpinning ECEC.

Author

• Dawn Murphy, Institute of Technology Carlow