“Why Can’t You Just Honor The Professional I Am?”:

California Preschool Teachers’ Meaning-Making and Resistance Across Policy Contexts

Abstract

This paper contends that qualitative research of early educators’ lived experiences is one conceptual and methodological step toward bridging early childhood education and care (ECEC) values, social and political-economic systems of power, and the daily practice of living alongside young children. Early educators are the least compensated and most marginalized teacher workforce in the U.S., tasked with sustaining the ECEC system without being afforded a certain future within it. Theorizing policy as processual and situated in the neoliberal political-economy of ECEC, this paper draws from life history interviews of six California teachers working in differently-funded preschool programs. Across policy contexts, teachers emphasized a sense of fidelity to developmental and social-constructivist principles, making them resistant to standardization and putting them at critical odds with teacher-directed, rote, or deficit-based approaches to education, which they framed as a norm of traditional schooling. This common purpose undergirded teachers’ meaning-making and resistance to political and organizational encroachments on their working conditions and professional autonomy. These educators' agentic, values-based, and tenacious experiences across policy contexts have important implications for ECEC research regarding teachers' lives within the field and the futures they seek to create and protect for the children in their care.