Borderland Narratives: Agency and Activism of Early Childhood Educators

The professional identity construction of early childhood educators has been identified as a ‘site of struggle’. Extant research investigates this struggle through analyses of structural and agentic discourses. This thesis explores the landscape in between these discourses and seeks to better understand and conceptualise the agency and activism of educators in this third space of negotiation and contestation. Combining critical, third space (Bhabha) and border (Anzaldua) theories, this interpretive study is a critical policy analysis and narrative inquiry in the context of early childhood education in England. Critical Discourse Analysis of workforce policy (2006- 17) is followed by empirical data analysis from 16 early educators’ professional life story interviews and an online focus group of 14 early educators. Novel conceptualisation and analysis of borderland narratives illustrate how early educator agency and activism are enacted in interstitial spaces. Findings show that educators are discursively positioned through workforce policy in multiple, competing and shifting ways. Institutionally shaped ‘ideal’ professional subjectivities are bordered by qualifications criteria, occupational standards and by intersections with broader policy reforms. Empirical data reveal educator agency manifests in numerous forms, including individual and collective activism. Whilst this activism appears constrained by policy demands it is also enabled by an educator’s critical awareness, professional confidence, and self-efficacy. Different forms of activism and resistance emerged from the study. Such resistance is not always largescale, collective or mobilised but is expressed in atomised contexts through a dispersed network of actors. Individual responses include ‘micro resistances’ which are often local, quiet and invisible but multiple. Privileging participants’ stories, the study offers insights into c/overt resistances revealing educators’ critical agency and their complex, nuanced and subversive responses to discursive policy manoeuvres. The research contributes to an understanding of identity construction of early educators and highlights the merits of broader, deeper engagement of educators in workforce reform.