Choosing to Leave: A Critical Narrative Inquiry into Early Childhood Educators’ Attrition Decisions

• In Event: Labor and Labor Movements Section Refereed Roundtables
  In Refereed Roundtable (60 minute): Roundtable 5: Gender, Care, and the (Re)Production of Inequality

Abstract

Teacher attrition significantly impacts early childhood education (ECE) settings, which include schools and daycares serving children from birth through age 8. High turnover harms children’s development, stresses remaining staff, and reduces program quality (Hale-Jinks et al., 2006; Kwon et al., 2020b; Markowitz, 2024; Totenhagen et al., 2015). ECE teaching is a highly feminized and racially diverse profession, with approximately 97% women and at least 40% women of color (McLean et al., 2021; McLean et al., 2024). To better understand how gendered and racialized workplace dynamics relate to ECE teacher attrition, this critical narrative inquiry examines four former ECE teachers’ experiences through a Marxist feminist lens. The study poses two questions: 1) What factors contributed to the ECE educators deciding to leave the field? and 2) What, if any, shifts in identity performance occurred for the ECE teachers who left their teaching positions? Ultimately, the teachers’ narratives reveal the ways that racism and sexism characterized their experiences in the field through exploitation of affective connections, persistent disrespect, and opportunity gaps that limited job mobility. Each participant described developing more resistant identity performances that supported their departure from teaching. These findings highlight workplace conditions contributing to attrition and underscore the need to study ECE teacher turnover through critical frameworks that address race, gender, and power in educational labor.

Keywords: early childhood education, teacher attrition, Marxist feminism, critical narrative inquiry

Authors

• Lucie Cyliax, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

• Stephanie C. Sanders-Smith, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign