Becoming a caring entrepreneurial early years practitioner in Chile

• In Event: Roundtable Session (Wednesday III)
  In Refereed Round-Table Session: Knowledge, training, and practice of early childhood teachers

Proposal

Early childhood education and care (ECEC) has rapidly risen within the international public agenda as the best strategy to ensure economic growth (Heckman, 2000; Heckman & Masterov, 2007). This economic rationale has been dominated by a neoliberal discourse that has shifted ECEC into the logics of the market in which practitioners and children are being understood as resources to the demands of the economy. This seems to be contradictory with the gendered discourse that have been traditionally recognized in early childhood education (Osgood, 2006; Skeggs, 1997). In effect, neoliberalism fosters the idea of a professionalism based on rationality, technical knowledge, and standardization as the best mechanisms to ensure quality. In opposition, nurturing and caring relationships appear as less relevant to professionalism (Brock, 2006; Osgood, Francis, & Archer, 2006; Skeggs, 1997; Vincent & Braun, 2011). This dichotomy has been widely studied in the literature as the education and care divide in ECEC (Bennett, 2003; Van Laere, Peeters, & Vandenbroeck, 2012), showing that an emphasis in education narrows down the purpose of ECEC to school while the nurturing dimension is subordinated to education.
Several scholars have argued that caring and nurturing rhetoric should be understood as resistance discourses to counter the effects of neoliberalism in education (Cameron, Owen, & Moss, 2001; Osgood, 2004, 2006, 2012; Page & Elfer, 2013). However, findings of this study show that this tension is not a duality, but underneath it hides more complex relations between the caring and economical discourses that are reflected in practitioners’ practices and ideas about professionalism.
This paper claims that neoliberalism is pervading even the caring dimension of ECEC and it is increasingly using the emotional discourse to extend an economic understanding of ECEC and the role of practitioners as competitive, entrepreneurial and efficient professionals through their emotional commitment. This study draws on a doctoral research exploring the construction of professional identities of early childhood educators in Chile. The research used a qualitative and interpretative approach to examine available discourses about being an ECEC professional in Chile.
The analysis is framed within postmodern theory, and uses Foucault’s concept of governmentality to excrutinize how the intertwined relations between neoliberal and emotional discourses align practitioners’ professional identities to the purposes, methods and culture of neoliberalism (Foucault, 2009).
This study is timely and original as Chile has been considered as the first and most radical experiment in educational policies worldwide (Harvey, 2007). From a comparative perspective the study sheds lights on the consequences of the extreme neoliberal policies within education and could serve to reflect about the dangers of an intensive and nearly exclusive focus of education as tool for economic growth. Furthermore, it contributes to the literature in claiming that the tension between education and care is more complex and the role of the neoliberal discourse in the marketization and commodification of practitioners’ emotions.

Author

• Ximena Poblete, Universidad Andres Bello