Teacher Lies: Negotiating Professional Expectations and Regulatory Frameworks in ECCE

• In Event: Obscured Truths and Tensions of ECCE (Early Childhood Care and Education) Professionals: That Which an Obedient Professional Conceals

Abstract

Objectives
In alignment with the notion of obscured truths and tensions, the fourth presentation speaks to the ways teachers resist and subvert the challenges of mandated policies and practices equated with “professionalism” (Archer, 2022; Leafgren, 2018). In many ways, teachers engage in implicit activism (Zembylas, 2013) in the face of policy and expected practices that often contradict teachers’ beliefs and knowledges of young children. We contend that when professional expectations and institutional constraints are imposed, teachers feel compelled to conceal true emotions, struggles, and desired practices. Such disconnect between public expectations and private realities undermine ECCE teacher well-being and professional satisfaction. This disconnect impacts teacher morale and jeopardizes the quality of care and education children receive.

To this end, we provocatively choose to name such teacher (in)actions and behaviors as lying, exploring why and how teachers lie while positioning lying as an element of “best” practice. Drawing on data from multiple studies, this paper contends that current educational policies often overlook teachers’ authentic experiences, forcing them to make deceitful choices while navigating a landscape of surveillance and standardization.

Methodology and Theoretical Framing
Struck that “good” teachers engage in lying in response to regulatory forces, we bring three individual studies into conversation, spurred by the data’s productive capacity to bring about new wonderings (MacLure, 2013). The studies individually include methods ranging from surveys and interviews to narrative teacher research and employ equally wide theoretical lenses, including ecological systems theory (Bronfenbrenner, 1979), critical childhoods (James et al., 1998), and feminist poststructural theories (Butler, 1990; Weedon, 1997). We choose to otherwise imagine this work with theories of affect (Dernikos et al., 2020; Massumi 1995) to layer new understandings of our data, thinking about the choices teachers make and how those choices may be manifestations of affective intensities (Massumi, 1995).

Data Sources
Returning to data sources, including transcribed interviews, surveys, and practitioner narratives, we explore moments where we felt teachers engaged in practices we might connote as “lying.” We then narrativized and analyzed these moments to explore 1) how we see lying revealed in teachers’ perceptions of their practice and 2) how the regulatory gaze, informed by notions of “professionalism” caused teachers to take up practices that feel like a lie.

Substantiated Conclusions
The authors illuminate obscured truths of ECCE teachers' reflections on (in)actions stemming from tensions in teachers’ professional and personal lives. Through stories of teachers’ “lying” practices, we foreground teachers’ agency and the critical and complicated underpinnings of moment-to-moment decisions made in daily teaching practice. For example, masking emotions with parents and administrators, suppressing curriculum goals in the face of safety mandates, or performing authority in response to discourses of control.

Significance
In advocating for a more humane and supportive ECCE environment, we call for a reconsideration of professional norms and institutional practices that inhibit teachers from expressing their genuine selves. It challenges the narrative that effective teaching necessitates emotional concealment, proposing instead that honoring teachers' authenticity is essential for sustaining both their professional well-being and ability to positively impact young learners.

Authors

• Emmanuelle N. Fincham, Western Washington University

• Cynthia Arraya Wiltshire, University of Texas - El Paso

• Amanda Reeves Fellner, Teachers College, Columbia University