‘They have tried to silence me.’

Beyond policy bordering: early childhood educators forging activist identities in the borderlands

Abstract

The roles of early childhood educators in England have been marked, in recent times, by prescriptive occupational standards, surveillance, and responsibilisation. Over the last thirty years, early educators have been discursively positioned through workforce policy in multiple, competing, and everchanging ways. In addition, ideal professional identities have been institutionally shaped and bounded by qualifications criteria, regulatory requirements, and by intersections with broader (and at times, authoritarian) policy reforms. This constitutes a process of policy bordering (Archer 2022), which delineates professional identity territory, creating a space for a particular version of professional identities whilst closing down others.

In response to this bordering process, a more dynamic, generative perspective recognises spaces for expressions of educator agency. Analysis of empirical data suggests such borders are, in fact, permeable with educators expressing their individual agency through these boundaries. Early childhood educators appear to be exploiting cracks and fissures in the borders to disrupt authoritarian demands upon them and exercise their personal power (Gallagher, 2000). Drawing on professional life story interviews of educators (n=18), this paper offers novel conceptualisation and analysis of borderland narratives, revealing how early educator agency and activism are asserted in interstitial spaces. By considering the role of borders (conceptual or otherwise) as sites of struggle, where the right to become is contested and negotiated, the borderlands concept illuminates the spaces of political possibilities (Brambilla, 2014), in which alternative professional subjectivities are enacted.