Governing education, governing early childhood education and care practitioners’ profession?

Abstract

Neo-liberal values affect early childhood education through the production of specific teacher subjectivities. These subjectivities are connected not only to the logic of competition, but also to competing definitions of worth, trust and values, as demonstrated by data. Neo-liberal values of accountability are also intertwined with the traditional discourse of child-centred learning. This study contributes to research concerning early childhood education and care staff’s professionalism by focusing on the effects of the commercialization of early childhood education and care teachers’ understanding of their work. With survey data (161 responses) collected from the five largest municipalities in Finland, the authors examine the reasoning that early childhood education and care staff provide for choosing commercial as well as non-commercial digital applications, licensed programmes and ready-made learning materials. The research is highly topical since the number of innovations targeted at early childhood education and care is increasing. Digitalization opens new ways for the privatization and marketization of education by introducing appealing commercially produced programmes and materials. In this study, the authors show how the advertising of these innovations as providing ‘easy solutions’ to improve either children's learning or early childhood education and care practitioners’ working time has become a discourse through which teachers and other staff members evaluate their work and their professionalism. In addition, the authors suggest that Finnish early childhood education and care practitioners seem to have internalized the pressure to enhance efficiency and accountability in early childhood education and care.