Making up teachers: Pre-kindergarten policy and teachers’ lived experiences

Abstract

Increased investment in publicly-funded pre-kindergarten (pre-K) in the USA has come with a concomitant focus on teacher professionalization. Pre-K policies and professionalization efforts often fail to acknowledge that they are layered upon a history of previous policies. New policies are inscribed onto this “discursive archive.” The intersection of a new policy and this discursive archive, viewed through the lived experiences of two pre-K teachers, is the focus of this article. Using critical policy analysis as a framework, I interrogate how a new pre-K policy in Lakeville, Wisconsin, “made up” the pre-K professional in particular ways. Lakeville’s policy came with a new conceptualization of the pre-K professional, framed in terms of particular credentials, pedagogies, and ways of being with children. I explore how this view of the pre-K professional made up two pre-K teachers by shaping their professional and material realities. The use of critical policy scholarship, which recognizes that policy is “permeated with power,” provides a way to understand Lakeville’s pre-K policy as more than an intervention into practice. Instead, it shaped teachers’ subjectivities by creating new norms and boundaries around how teachers were to be and act as pre-K professionals, which they took or resisted in particular ways.

Keywords

Pre-kindergarten policy lived experience teachers professionalization

Introduction

Efforts to expand access to and improve the quality of early childhood education (ECE) services have come with a concomitant focus on professionalizing the ECE teaching force (Neuman et al., 2015; Shaeffer, 2015; Sun et al., 2015; Urban, 2010). In the USA, as elsewhere, professionalization efforts have centered on increasing teachers’ educational qualifications, based on research that shows a positive relationship between teachers’ educational attainment and program quality (Early et al., 2006, 2007). In US publicly-funded prekindergarten (pre-K),¹ this focus on teacher qualifications has led most states to require that pre-K teachers hold a bachelor’s degree and specialized training in ECE (Barnett et al., 2016). Policies regulating teacher qualifications define the pre-K professional, in part, by drawing clear boundaries around who can and cannot teach pre-K. Policy also works in more subtle ways to define what it means to be a pre-K professional and to shape teachers’ daily experiences in pre-K classrooms. In this article, I examine how what it meant to be a pre-K professional was “subtly but decisively changed in the process of reform” (Ball, 2003: 218) in one school district, and how two teachers responded.

In 2011, the school district of Lakeville, Wisconsin,² introduced a new public pre-K policy. Drawing on Ball and colleagues’ (2012) notion that policies “make up” policy actors, this article examines how the policy defined what it meant to be a pre-K professional and how two teachers experienced having their subjectivities shaped by the policy. Just as teachers make sense of policy, policies “make sense of teachers, make them what and who they are in school and the classroom, make them up, produce them, articulate them” (Ball et al., 2012: 13–14). Lakeville’s pre-K policy articulated a particular conceptualization of the pre-K professional and defined how teachers should act and be in relation to children and families. This regulatory gaze (Osgood, 2006a) had practical implications for the teachers in this study, shaping their interactions and experiences in the classroom as well as their sense of themselves as professionals. Because the new policy was inscribed onto teachers’ “discursive archives,” or the “history of other policies, other languages and other subjectivities” that predated the new policy (Ball et al., 2012: 13), teachers took up or resisted the subject positions created for them by policy in particular ways. This analysis points to the importance of recognizing how a commonsense discourse of the pre-K professional embedded in policy has the power to shape teachers’ material realities and classroom experiences.

The politics of professionalization

In global efforts to professionalize the ECE teaching force, ECE teachers have been positioned as the subject of intervention (Urban, 2010). While the concept of professionalism is presented as a neutral or apolitical ideal, Osgood (2006b: 6) argues that the “externally imposed normalized construction of professionalism” ultimately works to erode teacher autonomy and morale. Through their construction of the professional, policies “coerce” teachers “into particular ways of being” (Jones and Osgood, 2007). In this way, policies such as Lakeville’s pre-K policy “make up” teachers (Ball et al., 2012).

Policy increasingly regulates ECE teachers’ daily work, often creating tension between teachers’ professional expertise and “top-down, expert knowledge” (Fenech et al., 2010: 89; Woodrow, 2007). This was evident in Lakeville’s pre-K policy, which introduced new regulations for how children should be assessed and how teachers should interact with families. By increasingly regulating teachers’ work, such policies limit teachers’ ability to use their professional judgement in decision making (Hatch, 2002: 459). A significant body of literature points to how discourses of “the professional” embedded in policy inform the ways teachers understand themselves as professionals (Bown and Sumsion, 2007; Bradbury, 2012; Delaney, 2015; Sisson, 2018; Sisson and Iverson, 2014; Woodrow, 2007). As teachers negotiate the range of discourses “through which they are shaped and in which they are positioned,” their subjectivities or “ways of being” are shaped (Osgood, 2006b: 7). Through this process, policy produces “new kinds of teacher subjects” (Ball, 2003: 217).

While many in the field are concerned with how ECE teachers’ practice is constrained by the increasing regulation of the profession, scholars also highlight the diverse and complex ways that teachers respond to regulations. In their study of Australian ECE teachers’ responses to new regulations, Fenech and Sumsion (2007) found that while most participants perceived them as constraining, some teachers were able to reposition those same regulations as enabling. Similarly, Bradbury (2012) found that an early childhood assessment policy had contradictory effects on teachers’ understandings of themselves and their professional status. Even as they resisted aspects of the policy, teachers took on and began to judge themselves in terms of how the policy defined what it meant to be a professional. Brown’s (2009) study of a standards-based education reform in the USA further highlighted the complexity of resistance. He found that a well-intentioned attempt to resist “the normalizing effects” of reform led to the “inscription of new discourses of self-government, discipline, and normalization” (Brown, 2009: 17).

This article examines how one pre-K policy in a USA school district created “new kinds of teacher subjects” and how two teachers responded. Building on prior research highlighting the diverse and sometimes contradictory ways ECE teachers respond to new policy regulations, I demonstrate how the teachers in this study “[resisted/drew upon]…public discourses to (re) position themselves as more or less ‘professional’” (Osgood, 2012: 2). I analyze the different ways teachers positioned themselves vis-à-vis the policy in light of how it intersected with their discursive archives and institutional contexts. By drawing on critical policy scholarship, I demonstrate how the power embedded in Lakeville’s pre-K policy “made up” teachers, with professional and material consequences.

Expansion of public pre-K in the US

The introduction of pre-K in Lakeville is set in the context of a nationwide expansion of state funded pre-K over the past 15 years. While some publicly-funded pre-K programs have operated for many years (e.g. Georgia, Michigan, Wisconsin), state pre-K is relatively new in many places. The most recent expansion of public pre-K began in the early 2000s with a campaign by the Pew Charitable Trusts aimed at increasing state investment in preschool (Bushouse, 2009). As a result of advocacy and investment, the percentage of four-year-olds enrolled in public pre-K more than doubled between 2002 and 2016, from 14 to 32% (Barnett et al., 2017). This expansion is notable because ECE in the USA historically has been provided by the private sector, with the exception of federally funded Head Start (Rose, 2010).

The USA has no national ECE policy and pre-K policies vary widely from state to state (Goffin, 2013). In some states, public pre-K is universal, with access granted to all age-eligible children, while in others it is only available to those considered “at risk” of low educational achievement. Program regulations, such as maximum class size and staff-child ratios, also vary, and spending on pre-K differs dramatically across programs (Barnett et al., 2017). Many programs include a requirement that pre-K teachers hold a bachelor’s degree and specialized training in early childhood education. In 2016, 51 of 59 state pre-K programs required specialized ECE training for head teachers and 35 of 59 required that lead teachers possess a bachelor’s degree.³ The relationship between teachers and pre-K quality has become normalized, in part, as a result of its inclusion as one of 10 quality standards for pre-K identified by the National Institute for Early Education Research (NIEER) in its annual evaluation of state pre-K programs. NIEER also emphasizes the importance of ongoing professional development and providing support for teachers to implement the curriculum and standards. Given the highly decentralized nature of public pre-K in the USA, NIEER’s quality standards construct, at the national level, one version of the pre-K professional. In this view, the pre-K professional is one who holds particular credentials, receives ongoing training, incorporates their knowledge of early learning standards into classroom practice, and implements the curriculum with fidelity.

Pre-K policy in Wisconsin and Lakeville

In Wisconsin, state funds for pre-K are available to any district that decides to implement the program. In the 2016–2017 school year, 98% of districts provided pre-K (Wisconsin Department of Public Instruction, 2017). At the state level, guidelines governing the implementation of pre-K are limited; most decision-making occurs at the district level (Graue et al., 2016). Pre-K programs are required to: be supervised by a school district; operate for 437 hours per year; be available free of cost to all age-eligible children in the district; provide transportation; and, employ teachers who have a bachelor’s degree and pre-K or kindergarten teaching certification. Districts receive additional funding if they provide parent outreach programming (Wisconsin Department of Public Instruction, 2008).

There are two models of pre-K implementation in Wisconsin. In the first, pre-K is housed entirely in public elementary schools. In the second model, the Community Approach (4K-CA), school districts contract with private preschools and childcare centers to provide pre-K. In a 4K-CA district, pre-K classrooms may be located entirely in private childcare sites or in a mix of public elementary school and private sites. Regardless of where pre-K is housed, teachers must adhere to state and local pre-K regulations (Wisconsin Department of Public Instruction, 2008). In 4K-CA, pre-K teachers working in private sites are often not considered school district employees and are paid according to their institution’s salary scale, which is typically much lower than that of the school district. This creates a challenge for teacher retention (Wilinski, 2017).

During the research year, just under half of Lakeville’s pre-K classrooms were located in private sites. The rest were in public elementary schools. Public school pre-K classrooms used the Creative Curriculum, while private sites could use any play-based curriculum that aligned with the state’s early learning standards. Teachers assessed children’s learning and development twice annually using a progress report developed by the school district. The policy also included a requirement that teachers provide 87.5 hours of parent outreach programming annually. Lakeville’s policy, taken together with state requirements, produced a conceptualization of the pre-K professional as one who held specific credentials, employed particular pedagogical practices, assessed children in particular ways, and prioritized interactions with families.

Conceptual framework

This analysis of how policy makes up teachers is situated in the field of critical policy studies, which engages with the ways policy meaning is negotiated by different actors in particular contexts (Honig, 2006; Maguire et al., 2015). In traditional approaches to policy analysis, policy is understood as a technical-rational tool, developed by a set of actors as the “only plausible response” to a particular set of conditions (Taylor et al., 1997: 5, as cited by Ball et al., 2012: 10). In this approach, the purpose of studying policy is to understand how it has been implemented, with a goal of developing more effective policies. In contrast, critical policy scholars like Ball have focused on “problematizing the rational approach of traditional policy research and emphasizing the role of power and ideology in the policy process” (Diem et al., 2019: 2). In the broadest sense, as Diem and Young (2015: 841, as cited in Diem et al., 2019: 4) explain, “Critical policy researchers engage in critique, interrogate the policy process and the epistemological roots of policy work, examine the players involved in the policy process, and reveal policy constructions.”

In this analysis, I draw in particular on Stephen Ball’s critical policy analysis work to examine teachers’ responses to the ways they are made up by policy. Ball (1993) defines policy as both text and discourse. As discourse, policies are “practices that systematically form the objects of which they speak…They constitute [objects] and in the practice of doing so conceal their own invention” (Foucault, 1997: 49, as cited in Ball, 1993: 14). Policies are thus “permeated with power” (Ball et al., 2012: 17). This power is productive—it draws new boundaries around what is possible in particular settings or circumstances. Policies also produce policy subjects, who take up or resist the roles ascribed to them. As policy subjects “take up positions constructed for [them] within policies” (Ball, 1993: 14), they are being “made up” by policy (Ball et al., 2012). In other words, policy shapes not just teachers’ practice but “who they are” (Ball, 2003: 215).

Central to this analysis of two teachers’ responses to being made up by pre-K policy is the idea that when a new policy is introduced, it does not enter “a social or institutional vacuum” (Ball, 1993: 11). Instead, it is inscribed onto a discursive archive of policies that have come before. Policies are never really new—each policy is interwoven with a history of other policies, what Ball (1993: 11) describes as an “interpretational and representational history.” Thus, teachers’ responses to the policy must be understood in terms of how the new policy intersected with their own discursive archives, or the policies that previously governed their work and contributed to their understanding of what it meant to be a pre-K professional.

Methodology

This paper is drawn from a year-long ethnographic study of pre-K policy enactment that asked: How is pre-K conceptualized at different levels of implementation, from state policy to local classrooms? The study was carried out in Lakeville, Wisconsin during the second year of the school district’s implementation of universal pre-K for four-year-olds. I conducted fieldwork in three focal teachers’ classrooms that represented the range of settings where pre-K was provided in the district: a private part-day preschool (Friendship Preschool), a for-profit childcare center (Bright Start Childcare Center), and a public elementary school (Forest Grove Elementary School). Conducting the research in this range of sites allowed me to understand how their institutional contexts shaped teachers’ interactions with policy. At each site, I identified a focal teacher who had worked at their site prior to the start of pre-K in order to understand whether and how institutional norms and teachers’ experiences had changed as pre-K was implemented.

To generate a rich understanding of teachers’ work and experiences, I conducted 300 hours of observation in focal teachers’ classrooms, staff meetings, curriculum planning meetings, district-wide pre-K planning meetings, and a school board meeting. I conducted three in-depth interviews with each focal teacher (nine total) and interviews with other key stakeholders, including: focal teachers’ administrators (four) and co-teachers (two), pre-K teachers, kindergarten teachers, and other administrators in the district (six), influential ECE stakeholders in the district (3), and a state education official familiar with the district (one). Despite repeated requests, I was unable to interview school district officials, so my understanding of district perspectives comes from policy documents and observations at school board and district-wide pre-K meetings. To ensure trustworthiness of data, I shared field notes with focal teachers after every visit and solicited their feedback. Prolonged engagement in the field (Creswell and Poth, 2018), coupled with the use of strategies of data source triangulation and methodological triangulation (Maxwell, 2013) also contributed to reliable interpretation of the data.

In this article, I draw on a subset of the data to examine how Lakeville’s pre-K policy “made up” two of the focal teachers—Linda and Megan—in particular ways. I analyze the experiences of only two teachers of the three focal teachers because both had taught in ECE settings prior to the start of pre-K and therefore had more fully developed ideas about what it meant to be an ECE professional than the third focal teacher, who did not consider herself an ECE professional prior to teaching pre-K. I analyze how elements of the policy aimed at professionalizing or ensuring the quality of the pre-K teaching force came into contact with teachers’ existing notions of professionalism. Data sources for this paper include: policy documents outlining expectations and requirements for teachers, focal teacher interviews, and classroom observation field notes. Policy documents and field notes from district meetings provide insight into the district’s framing of the pre-K professional. By setting this against teachers’ experiences and reflections on enacting pre-K, I uncover the ways that policy made up each teacher in different ways as it intersected with her prior experiences, beliefs about teaching, and institutional context.

I took a critical stance in my analysis of the data by positioning the pre-K policy as productive and “permeated with power.” The making up of teachers by policy is not neutral or apolitical—the policy was a discursive incursion into teachers’ lives that had real consequences. As I demonstrate in the findings sections, the power wielded by the policy was “relational and situated”—it led to different outcomes for differently-positioned teachers (Ball et al., 2012: 17). My analysis was therefore not limited to examining how teachers made sense of and enacted policy, which has been the focus of much policy scholarship (e.g. Coburn, 2001; Goldstein, 2008). Instead, I analyze how the policy, which discursively made up teachers as professionals, had material and professional consequences for teachers.

I used the qualitative data analysis software MAXQDA to facilitate analysis. Critical policy scholarship does not promote or employ a single methodology or analytic method; instead, such work involves an orientation toward policy analysis that represents a departure from a positivist approach to policy analysis (Young and Diem, 2017). Stephen Ball, whose work I draw on to frame this study, does not articulate a specific analytic method but engages with a broad range of methodologies that require diverse approaches to analysis (see, for example, Ball, 1994, 2016; Vincent and Ball, 2001, 2007). In this study, I employed ethnographic methods as a way to “think about the role and nature of policy… recognizing that the policies that shape and structure our everyday/lived world are not neutral, objective, or value-free” (Fernandez and Lopéz, 2017: 114). Thus, I took an approach to analysis that is typical in ethnographic studies, beginning with a close reading of the data reading, which led to several rounds of coding (Emerson et al., 2011). As I describe below, Saldaña’s approach to qualitative data analysis enabled a greater depth of understanding once I identified initial themes in the data.

I began analysis by reading policy documents to identify how policy and district officials conceptualized the teacher as a professional. Themes identified during this coding process centered on teacher credentials, professional development, pedagogy (and attendant assessment practices), and relationships with parents. Next, I open-coded focal teacher interviews, looking for evidence of the ways teachers made sense of their role as ECE professionals and the extent to which this aligned with the district conceptualization (Emerson et al., 2011; Saldaña, 2016). After this initial round of coding, I conducted a second round of coding, using values coding to analyze “participant’s values, attitudes, and beliefs, representing his or her perspectives or worldview” (Saldaña, 2016: 131). From this, I developed an analytic memo for each teacher in which I analyzed her perspectives and experiences as an ECE professional in relation to district policy (Emerson et al., 2011). I also analyzed classroom observation field notes for confirming and disconfirming evidence of my initial understandings and incorporated this information into analytic memos, which served as the basis of the findings section.

Findings: Making up Linda and Megan

Requirements for teachers in Lakeville’s pre-K policy contributed to a local conceptualization of the pre-K professional as someone with particular training and credentials, who implemented an aligned, play-based curriculum, assessed children using a district-mandated tool, regularly participated in professional development, and engaged in particular types of outreach with pre-K families. Here I demonstrate how each focal teacher experienced being made up by this policy vision of the ECE professional, pointing out the ways she resisted or engaged with this policy vision in order “to (re) position [herself] as more or less ‘professional’” (Osgood, 2012: 2).

Linda Jenkins – Friendship Preschool

The first year of Lakeville pre-K was Linda’s eighth year at Friendship Preschool, an elite part-day preschool that prided itself on its play-based philosophy. Linda’s discursive archive included a focus on preparing the environment for open-ended exploration; for her, this was a critical aspect of being an ECE professional. A former elementary school teacher, Linda saw pre-K as a refuge from the academic pressures of kindergarten because pre-K teachers could embody the tenets of developmentally appropriate practice (Copple and Bredekamp, 2009). Linda expressed her belief that children should learn through play rather than teacher-directed activities; this was reflected in her pedagogy and in her focus on “authentic” assessment.

In some ways, Lakeville’s pre-K policy mirrored Linda’s understanding of what it meant to be a pre-K professional. Lakeville pre-K was play-based, and sites that provided pre-K were able to choose their own curriculum. Because of this, Linda asserted that, despite the new policy, “We’re doing the same thing we’ve always done.” Yet, the district-required assessment created tension between Linda’s notion of herself as a professional and the district’s framing of the professional as one who collected particular types of data. Linda had long used a portfolio-based assessment to document children’s development, but the mandated progress report required her to evaluate children’s progress toward universal benchmarks. What troubled Linda was that the progress report required specifics, such as the number of letters a child could identify or how high a child could count by rote. From her perspective, the progress report was not an “authentic” assessment because it required “hard data.” Linda felt that to comply with the policy, she had to adopt a new approach to assessment that conflicted with her beliefs about how good ECE professionals assess learning and development. The assessment requirement thus diminished some of the professional autonomy Linda had long experienced at Friendship. By “[creating] circumstances in which the range of options available…[were] narrowed” (Ball, 1994: 19), the policy made her up in a new way—as someone who collected “hard data” on children. This contrasted with her view of herself as a teacher who learned about children’s development through careful observation and documentation.

Linda experienced the introduction of a “dominant district narrative informed by particular notions of professionalism” (in this case, the pre-K policy) in part as a challenge to her own conceptualization of the pre-K professional (Sisson and Iverson, 2014: 219). The misalignment between policy discourse and Linda’s beliefs about assessment led her to resist this aspect of the policy; she positioned her own expertise and ideas about what being an ECE professional entailed as more professional than what was required by policy (Osgood, 2012). Even though she disagreed with the policy’s approach to assessment, however, Linda was unable to resist it completely. Not complying with the pre-K policy would put her job and her school’s ability to be a pre-K site in jeopardy. Because of the way the pre-K policy reshaped the ECE landscape in Lakeville, private preschools and ECE centers that did not partner with the school district saw a significant decline in enrollment of four-year-olds, which threatened their financial viability (Wilinski, 2017). In addition to discursively shaping what it meant to be a pre-K professional in Lakeville, the policy had material consequences. Linda complied with the district assessment mandate, but in a way that allowed her to reconcile her own professional beliefs with the demands of the policy (Bradbury, 2012). Rather than “testing” children, she engaged them in games and activities that allowed her to complete progress reports accurately. Linda thus took up the new subjectivity created for her in the policy, but in a way that better “fit into the overall texture and rhythms” of her work (Ball et al., 2012: 13). As she did this, however, she created a new set of norms, albeit for herself, that governed her actions as a pre-K teacher (Brown, 2009).

Megan Stevenson – Bright Start Childcare Center

Megan Stevenson taught the four-year-old class at Bright Start Childcare Center (BSCC), a for-profit corporate childcare center, for several years before public pre-K was introduced. Though her pre-K classroom was bright and welcoming, corporate branding permeated the building and its scripted curriculum reinforced the bureaucratic nature of the center. Megan taught a morning and afternoon pre-K session four days per week. She also supervised children before and after official pre-K hours and on Mondays, which she referred to as “non-pre-K days.” The distinction between pre-K and non-pre-K days provides a lens for understanding how Megan readily took up the subject position created for her by the pre-K policy. Megan described non-pre-K days as “less structured” and “less curriculum-based and more free-choice” than pre-K days. The cast of characters was more or less the same, yet non-pre-K days had a distinct feel; although she was still engaged with children, Megan spent Mondays preparing materials for the rest of the week while children played in learning centers. Non-pre-K days were the time that Megan dutifully prepared herself to take on the pre-K professional role articulated in policy. Ironically, this meant not enacting that role on non-pre-K days, even though she was with the same group of children. The way Meagan embodied the pre-K policy reflects the reality that “early childhood teachers negotiate regulation not in a vacuum, but mindful of contextual influence” (Fenech and Sumsion, 2007: 117).

Megan’s distinction between pre-K and non-pre-K time reflected a school district perspective that while pre-K was geared explicitly toward meeting benchmarks in state early learning standards, non-pre-K time meant that children were simply being “watched.” From a district perspective, pre-K required a professional with particular knowledge and expertise, whereas other ECE spaces did not. Megan seemed to embody this distinction, and thus experienced being made up by the policy quite differently than Linda. Whereas Linda viewed the policy as undermining her professional expertise by requiring her to engage in practices that she felt were inappropriate (e.g. assessment), the policy produced Megan as a professional in a way that appeared to align with the discursive archive that shaped her understanding of what it meant to be a pre-K professional.

Megan also experienced positive changes at her institutions because the policy amplified her status as a professional (Bradbury, 2012). For example, Megan’s weekly planning time was prioritized over her colleagues’ because, as she put it, the BSCC director understood “there’s a lot more involved with [pre-K].” She was also given compensated release time to attend several district-wide professional development sessions. Given the BSCC’s focus on labor hours and its bottom line, this stood out to Megan as highly unusual. Finally, Megan leveraged her improved status at the center to negotiate a small raise and a flexible summer schedule that enabled her to earn extra income teaching in a school district summer program. As a result of the pre-K policy, Megan’s expertise was “made visible by the discourse of professionalism” (Sisson and Iverson, 2014: 220). Because of the value placed on specific “credentials, knowledge, and expertise” (Sisson and Iverson, 2014: 220) under the new policy, Megan enjoyed opportunities for status and advancement that were previously unavailable to her.

Discussion and conclusion

In this study, I have drawn on critical policy scholarship as a framework to analyze how two public pre-K teachers experienced and responded to policy requirements that made them up in particular ways as professionals (Ball et al., 2012). The use of critical policy scholarship, which recognizes that policy is “permeated with power,” provides a way to understand Lakeville’s pre-K policy as more than an intervention into practice. Instead, it shaped teachers’ subjectivities by creating new norms and boundaries around how they were to be and act as pre-K professionals. Focal teachers Linda and Megan had different pre-existing notions of professionalism, which comprised the discursive archive onto which the new policy was inscribed. In addition, their work was situated in different institutional contexts, which led to divergent experiences of being made up by the policy. Attending to the contexts in which teachers experienced the new policy provides a way of understanding the multiple and sometimes conflicting ways that regulations may be experienced by ECE teachers (Bradbury, 2012; Fenech and Sumsion, 2007). Linda experienced tension when new policy requirements came into contact with her beliefs about assessment in ECE settings; she positioned herself in opposition to the policy’s view of the professional. In contrast, the policy’s conceptualization of the professional seemed to afford Megan status and benefits that were not previously available in the context of her institution.

In combination with ethnographic methods that enable a deep understanding of local contexts, a critical policy framework also provides insight into how teachers respond when new policies are layered onto their discursive archive of policies and practices. The assumption that no policy enters a vacuum provides a way to begin to understand why policies are taken up, negotiated, and resisted in particular ways (Bauml, 2015; Delaney, 2015). An understanding of policy as productive and powerful, which creates layered expectations for the ways its subjects will think and act, is particularly useful for interrogating normalized discourses of the professional and professionalism in ECE (Fenech et al., 2010; Urban, 2010). It provides a space for questioning the logic that teachers should be the object of interventions or that there is only one way of being a professional. Sachs (2003: 121) has described teacher professionalism as a “site of struggle between various interest groups” that is constantly in flux (as cited by Fenech et al., 2010: 91). Conceptualizing Lakeville’s pre-K policy as one of a range of available discourses opens up a space to consider and value other notions of the professional and what it means to be a professional. As Bradbury (2012: 176) points out, “conceptions of professionalism are multiple, fluid, and powerful in their ability to affect teachers’ roles.” This builds on Ball’s (2003) assertion that “Policy has the potential to affect not only what teachers do, but ‘who they are’” (215). The examples of Linda and Megan pointed specifically to the ways that two teachers resisted or took up the subject positions created for them in Lakeville’s pre-K policy. Each teacher experienced and responded to the policy’s power to shape her subjectivity differently, based on her own experience and the discursive archive onto which the new policy was inscribed. As calls to professionalize the ECE teaching force resound, findings from this study point to a key role for critical policy scholarship in interrogating the taken-for-granted discourses embedded in policy, which shape teachers’ subjectivities and material realities in powerful ways.

Footnotes

Funding

The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Notes

ORCID iD

Bethany Wilinski

Author Biography

Bethany Wilinski is a former preschool teacher and assistant professor in the Department of Teacher Education at Michigan State University. Her research in the U.S. and Tanzania examines how policies shape the lived experience of pre- and in-service pre-K teachers. Her recent book, When Pre-K Comes to School: Policy, Partnerships, and the Early Childhood Workforce (Teachers College Press, 2017), investigates how pre-K policy intersected with individuals and institutions in the context of a school district-community pre-K partnership. Her current work in Michigan is focused on understanding the experiences of public pre-K teachers working in elementary schools. Her research on pre-K teachers has been published in Teachers College Press and Teaching and Teacher Education.

References

Ball

(1993) What is policy? Texts, trajectories and toolboxes. Discourse: Studies in the Cultural Politics of Education 13(2): 10–17.

Ball

(1994) Education Reform: A Critical and Post-Structural Approach. Philadelphia: Open University Press.

Ball

(2003).The teacher’s soul and the terrors of performativity. Journal of Education Policy 18(2): 215–228.

Ball

(2016) Following policy: Networks, network ethnography and education policy mobilities. Journal of Education Policy 31(5): 549–566.

Barnett

Friedman

Hustedt

, et al. (2009) An overview of prekindergarten policy in the United States: Program governance, eligibility, standards, and finance. In: Pianta

Howes

(eds) The Promise of Pre-K. Baltimore, MD: Paul H. Brookes Publishing Co., pp.3–30.

Barnett

Friedman-Krauss

Gomez

, et al. (2016) The State of Preschool 2015. New Brunswick: National Institute for Early Education Research.

Barnett

Friedman-Krauss

Weisenfeld

, et al. (2017) The State of Preschool 2016. New Brunswick: National Institute for Early Education Research.

Bauml

(2015) Beginning primary teachers’ experiences with curriculum guides and pacing calendars for math and science instruction. Journal of Research in Childhood Education 29(3): 390–409.

Bown

Sumsion

(2007) Voices from the other side of the fence: Early childhood teachers’ experiences with mandatory regulatory requirements. Contemporary Issues in Early Childhood 8(1): 30–49.

10.

Bradbury

(2012) “I feel absolutely incompetent”: Professionalism, policy and early childhood teachers. Contemporary Issues in Early Childhood 13(3): 175–186.

11.

Brown

(2009) Being accountable for one’s own governing: A case study of early educators responding to standards-based early childhood education reform. Contemporary Issues in Early Childhood 10(1): 3–23.

12.

Bushouse

(2009) Universal Preschool: Policy Change, Stability, and the Pew Charitable Trusts. Albany: State University of New York Press.

13.

Coburn

(2001) Collective sensemaking about reading: How teachers mediate reading policy in their professional communities. Educational Evaluation and Policy Analysis 23(2): 145–170.

14.

Copple

Bredekamp

(2009) Developmentally Appropriate Practice in Early Childhood Programs Serving Children from Birth Through Age 8. 3rd ed. Washington, DC: National Association for the Education of Young Children.

15.

Creswell

Poth

(2018) Qualitative Inquiry and Research Design: Choosing Among Five Approaches. Thousand Oaks: SAGE Publications, Inc.

16.

Delaney

(2015) Dissonance for understanding: Exploring a new theoretical lens for understanding teacher identity formation in borderlands of practice. Contemporary Issues in Early Childhood 16(4): 374–389.

17.

Diem

Young

Sampson

(2019) Where critical policy meets the politics of education: An introduction. Educational Policy, 33(1): 3–15.

18.

Early

Bryant

Pianta

, et al. (2006) Are teachers’ education, major, and credentials related to classroom quality and children’s academic gains in pre-kindergarten? Early Childhood Research Quarterly 21(2): 174–195.

19.

Early

Maxwell

Burchinal

, et al. (2007) Teachers’ education, classroom quality, and young children’s academic skills: Results from seven studies of preschool programs. Child Development 78(2). 558–580.

20.

Emerson

Fretz

Shaw

(2011) Writing Ethnographic Fieldnotes. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

21.

Fenech

Sumsion

(2007) Early childhood teachers and regulation: Complicating power relations using a Foucauldian lens. Contemporary Issues in Early Childhood 8(2): 109–122.

22.

Fenech

Sumsion

Shepherd

(2010) Promoting early childhood teacher professionalism in the Australian context: The place of resistance. Contemporary Issues in Early Childhood 11(1): 89–105.

23.

Fernandez

Lopéz

(2017) When parents behave badly: A critical policy analysis of parent involvement in schools. In: Young

Diem

(eds) Critical Approaches to Education Policy Analysis . Switzerland: Springer International Publishing, pp.111–130.

24.

Goffin

(2013) Early childhood Education For A New Era: Leading Our Profession. New York: Teachers College Press.

25.

Goldstein

(2008) Kindergarten teachers making “street-level” education policy in the wake of No Child Left Behind. Early Education and Development 19(3): 448–478.

26.

Graue

Wilinski

Nocera

(2016). Local control in the era of accountability: A case study of Wisconsin preK. Education Policy Analysis Archives, 24, p.60.

27.

Hatch

(2002) Accountability shovedown: Resisting the standards movement in early childhood education. Phi Delta Kappan 83(6): 457–462.

28.

Honig

(2006) Complexity and policy implementation: Challenges and opportunities for the field. In: Honig

(ed.) New Directions In Education Policy Implementation: Confronting Complexity. Albany: State University of New York Press, pp.1–24.

29.

Jones

Osgood

(2007) Mapping the fabricated identity of childminders: Pride and prejudice. Contemporary Issues in Early Childhood 8(4): 289–300.

30.

Maguire

Braun

Ball

(2015) “Where you stand depends on where you sit”: The social construction of policy enactments in the (English) secondary school. Discourse: Studies in the Cultural Politics of Education 36(4): 485–499.

31.

Maxwell

(2013) Qualitative Research Design: An Interactive Approach. 3rd ed. Washington, DC: Sage.

32.

Neuman

Josephson

Chua

(2015) A Review of the Literature: Early Childhood Care and Education (ECCE) Personnel in Low- and Middle-income Countries. Paris: UNESCO.

33.

Osgood

(2006a) Rethinking “professionalism” in the early years: Perspectives from the United Kingdom. Contemporary Issues in Early Childhood 7(1): 1.

34.

Osgood

(2006b) Deconstructing professionalism in early childhood education: Resisting the regulatory gaze. Contemporary Issues in Early Childhood 7(1): 5.

35.

Osgood

(2012) Narratives From The Nursery: Negotiating Professional Identities In Early Childhood. New York: Routledge.

36.

Rose

(2010) The Promise of Preschool: From Head Start to Universal Pre-Kindergarten. New York: Oxford University Press.

37.

Saldaña

(2016) The Coding Manual for Qualitative Researchers. 3rd ed. Thousand Oaks: SAGE.

38.

Shaeffer

(2015) The Promotion of Decent Work for Early Childhood Education Personnel: The Professionalization of a Neglected Profession. Geneva: International Labour Organization.

39.

Sisson

(2018) Preschool teachers as undercover agents within the figured world of public school. Contemporary Issues in Early Childhood 19(2): 142–153.

40.

Sisson

Iverson

(2014) Disciplining professionals: A feminist discourse analysis of public preschool teachers. Contemporary Issues in Early Childhood 15(3): 217–230.

41.

Sun

Rao

Pearson

(2015) Policies and Strategies to Enhance The Quality of Early Childhood Educators. Paris: UNESCO.

42.

Urban

(2010) Rethinking professionalism in early childhood: Untested feasibilities and critical ecologies. Contemporary Issues in Early Childhood 11(1): 1–7.

43.

Vincent

Ball

(2001) A market in love? Choosing pre-school childcare. British Educational Research Journal 27(5): 633–651.

44.

Vincent

Ball

(2007) “Making up” the middle-class child: Families, activities and class dispositions. Sociology 41(6): 1061–1077.

45.

Wilinski

(2017). When pre-K comes to school: Policy, partnerships, and the early childhood education workforce. New York: Teachers College Press.

46.

Wisconsin Department of Public Instruction (2008) Policy and information advisory 08.01: Four-year-old kindergarten. Available at: https://dpi.wi.gov/sites/default/files/imce/fscp/pdf/4kbul08.pdf (accessed 14 September 2017)

47.

Wisconsin Department of Public Instruction (2017) 97.6 percent of districts offering elementary education provide 4K. Available at: https://dpi.wi.gov/news/releases/2017/976-percent-districts-offering-elementary-education-provide-4k (accessed 14 September 2017)

48.

Woodrow

(2007) W(h)ither the early childhood teacher: Tensions for early childhood professional identity between the policy landscape and the politics of teacher regulation. Contemporary Issues in Early Childhood 8(3): 233–243.

49.

Young

Diem

(2017) Introduction: Critical approaches to education policy analysis. In: Young

Diem

(eds) Critical Approaches To Education Policy Analysis. Switzerland: Springer International Publishing, pp.1–18.