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Early YearsAn International Research Journal

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Teachers’ voice, power and agency:(un)professionalisation of the early yearsworkforce

Marek Tesar, Branislav Pupala, Ondrej Kascak & Sonja Arndt

To cite this article: Marek Tesar, Branislav Pupala, Ondrej Kascak & Sonja Arndt (2017) Teachers’voice, power and agency: (un)professionalisation of the early years workforce, Early Years, 37:2,189-201, DOI: 10.1080/09575146.2016.1174671

To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/09575146.2016.1174671

Published online: 25 May 2016.

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Early yEars, 2017VOl. 37, NO. 2, 189–201http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/09575146.2016.1174671

Teachers’ voice, power and agency: (un)professionalisation of the early years workforce

Marek Tesara, Branislav Pupalab, Ondrej Kascakb and Sonja Arndtc

aFaculty of Education and social Work, University of auckland, auckland, New Zealand; bTrnva University & slovak academy of sciences, Trnava, slovakia; cFaculty of Education, University of Waikato, Hamilton, New Zealand

ABSTRACTThis article examines Slovak early years teachers’ concerns with conceptions of teacher professionalism. It suggests that there is a mismatch between understandings of professionalism, policy aspirations and the attitudes of teachers to their own professionalism, and that this mismatch fuels early years teachers’ sense of agency. These tensions between conceptions of professionalism, teaching practice and actual working conditions have led to a ground-up approach to self-governance within the early years teacher workforce. We analyse teachers’ discussions in an early years online forum of 12,500 members that was started and remains governed by the teachers themselves. It represents in itself a very particular attitude and response to the need to determine what it means to be a professional teacher. This analysis examines intersections of policy, quality and professionalism, and highlights considerations of power and voice, and the complexities of uncertainty and change. The article concludes with the suggestion that teacher attitudes, power and agency are impacted in unpredictable ways by the policy landscape.

Introduction

Recent policy developments in the early years workforce in many countries have prompted strong shifts in teacher attitudes. This article analyses policy developments and emerging teacher orientations towards their workforce and profession in Slovakia, by examining data from an online discussion forum that involved more than 12,500 Slovak early years teachers. The discussion forum has been open for all early years teachers to access as a space where teachers express, engage with and form their professional attitudes, and the discussions in it reflect changes and developments in the policy debate in Slovakia since 2011. Teachers’ narratives and responses to policy and curriculum changes, and their concerns around qual-ity and working conditions, form an important counterpoint to official Ministry documents, outlines and statements about who counts as a professional teacher and about early years teachers’ roles in the teaching workforce. The attitudes of the early years teachers present a particular view and narrative on the often-contested notion of professionalism, revealing

© 2016 TaCTyC

KEYWORDSTeacher voice; professionalism; teacher agency; early years

ARTICLE HISTORYreceived 29 June 2015 accepted 28 March 2016

CONTACT Marek Tesar m.tesar@auckland.ac.nz

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staggering mismatches and tensions between the official ideology and the attitudes of the workforce. This article uses a Foucauldian/Havelian theoretical lens to examine the tensions in the teacher workforce, and how teachers understand their professionalism within the Slovak early years sector.

While strongly embedded in the local context, the experiences of early years teachers in Slovakia are not unique. To demonstrate, this article offers a brief juxtaposition with the policy turns in New Zealand, where a de-professionalisation of the workforce can be traced to policy intervention and funding shifts. The analysis of these contexts illustrates relation-ships between conceptualisations of professionalism and quality early years education, through intersections of subjective experiences and local policy discourses. These discourses have become punctuated with quality indicators that do not necessarily encompass the complexity of the sector, but that elevate the importance of economic indicators and outputs, shifting views, orientations and notions of accountability and thereby change the way the ‘professional early years teacher’ is perceived.

Conceptual and theoretical framework

The theoretical framework of thinking with early years teacher narratives follows Foucault’s ideas on power to examine perceptions and voice and how they manifest in contemporary teacher professionalism. It uses Havel’s (1985, 1989) work on the formation of subjectivities in any ideological context. Foucault’s work is well known for its genealogical explorations of power relations in political, ideologically driven societies (Foucault 1994). The traditional model of a juridical power construct claims that power belongs to someone; that is, that it can be possessed by a class, group of people or by an institution (lemke 2002). In other words, within this concept, an individual or an institution at the top of the hierarchy possesses the power. This power is then owned and subsequently enforced and applied over the sub-jects below. Such a distribution of power can therefore be seen as punitive, dark, repressive, and usually takes the form of orders and pressure. Foucault (1991) argues that historically the way such repressive power was utilised, for example in prisons, was by punishing the subjects, the prisoners, and disciplining their bodies. Foucault however rejects this punitive and repressive model of power, and re-conceptualises it in a new form, arguing for a disci-plinary type of power, where power is exercised, rather than possessed. Thus, the key point of Foucault’s thinking is that power is not only repressive, but also productive by nature, and his claim that power produces knowledge and subjectivities is decisive in this study of teacher attitudes. An understanding of power as productive means that power cannot be studied on its own, but needs to be linked to institutions, political contexts, ideologies and the government, as mechanisms of ‘visibility’, and in this article also subjects, the early years teachers.

Foucault’s notion of disciplinary power, and how it shapes early years discourses, is linked with Havel’s conceptual thinking. Havel (1985) is concerned with shifts within the power relations of an ideological system. He explores the way that power operates in the public and private domain, and how it means that if citizens want to live a comfortable life without repercussions, they have to accept living within ‘a lie’ and publicly conforming to the system and its requirements (Havel 1989). As such, power relations are governed by a social contract, under which citizens support the prescribed rules, and publicly demonstrate their support of the regime and governing ideology, to minimise repression towards them and to ensure

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that their private lives remain untouched. This kind of environment creates a particular kind of conduct, which can be seen as a framework of victim, supporter and rebel (Tesar 2014), where all members of society suffer under the system, support it and at the same time rebel against it. Havel’s understanding of power focuses not on how one political or social group uses power over the other group, but rather on how the power relations produce the dynam-ics between these groups. Havel thus isolates ideology as an essential mechanism of power, as it gives it a purpose, provides its identity, and connects it to rules and structures. Ideology is something that all citizens, teachers and children experience as an inescapable influence on their everyday life in early years settings.

Methodology

This analysis of teacher voices, contexts and agency uses a narrative inquiry method, focused on constructions of the self and the Other, through writing the self. This article utilises Galea’s (2014) premise that ‘the self comes into being through his or her very own writing actions’ (142). This argument aligns with Foucault’s (1988) idea of acts of writing as self care, involving ‘taking notes on oneself to be reread, writing treatises and letters to friends to help them, and keeping notebooks in order to reactivate for oneself the truths one needed’ (27). This online discussion forum provided such a writing platform for early years teachers, and the teachers’ posts became, as analysed below, notes for themselves and their colleagues, rep-resenting ‘writing as self-care’, ‘treatises’ and activations and ‘reactivations of truths’. These are representative of the new social movements manifested through online social media (Castells 2012), such as, in this instance, Facebook, within which the online discussion was securely hosted. The professional teacher narratives are drawn from online discussions, which are recognised in Slovakia as civic participation platforms (Petrjanosova 2014), and as a significant source of engagement in specific communities (Baker 2013).

As a methodological tool, online discussions offer insights into relatively unrestrained dynamics and attitudes, due to their largely informal and unmonitored environment. Online discussions help to minimalise the contradictions between, for example, a declared public attitude, and a ‘real’ opinion or conviction, allowing teachers’ language to become much less formal, more every-day and, following Havel’s (1985) conceptions of power, more sincere. Slovak teachers in all education sectors have created online discussion forums within Facebook platforms, to use their voice and power to express their attitudes and feelings. The early years teachers founded and run this online discussion within a Facebook platform. It is a closed group with over 12,500 members and can be accessed by registered members only. Most members of the group are early years teachers working in public Kindergartens. More than two thirds of the professional early years teacher workforce are members of the early years online forum. The analysis of this online discussion does not represent any one particular truth from the examination of the postings. Instead, it focuses on the significance of the early years teachers’ use of the online discussion as a writing of their professional self, demonstrating its importance in ‘reactivating’ their multiple truths. Following Tesar (2014), the examination of the online forums traces a rebellion against the dominant ideology, as perceived by Slovak early years teachers, through their attitudes and their profession.

The ethics of using online discussions as research data requires careful consideration, and the ethical integrity of this study is attended to on a number of levels. Two of the researchers and authors of this article are members of the closed Facebook discussion group. They have

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been given permission to conduct this study of online discussions, and have permission to use and analyse the quotes obtained. Further, the group rules, to which all members agree on joining the closed group, include Rule 11, which explicitly states that ‘communication on [this online discussion forum] is a public concern’ and that all expressions and contributions are made in this knowledge. As a further protection of contributor identities, all names and settings have been altered, so the quotes do not identify particular individuals, settings or localities. These complexities have also been explored elsewhere (Pupala, Kascak, and Tesar 2016).

Data collected in this study have been obtained through regular monitoring of the dis-cussion forum. The Facebook group was established in 2011, and discussions have been monitored at least three times per week for the three years since November 2012. The authors have carefully translated the content, as they are familiar with both the Slovak and New Zealand early years education contexts and relevant languages. Careful attention has been given to capturing both the context and the tone of the language used in the discussions to reflect the intent and discourses that they represent. The authors are experienced teacher educators in university settings, and draw on their experiences to understand the insights offered in the data gathered. By scrutinising the posts in these regular readings, the authors have identified particular attitudes, orientations and themes as they emerge, and as they demonstrate teacher perceptions of their own motivations, identities and professionalism – or perceived unprofessionalism – of their workforce. The teachers’ voices, power relations and agency are examined through representative quotes taken from these discussions.

Teacher professionals – teacher ‘amateurs’

The Slovak early years policy context has not traditionally been strongly influenced by Western imperatives. The OeCD Starting Strong reports, however, are the only OeCD publi-cations adopted by the Ministry of education in Slovakia, and are used to create a framework for the future direction of early years education. They offer guidance, for example, in relation to significant indicators of professional identities and parent and community partnerships. The OeCD states, that ‘Parents and communities should be regarded as ‘partners’ working towards the same goal. Home learning environments and neighbourhood matter for healthy child development and learning’ (OeCD 2012, 12). Contradictions arise in this policy imper-ative for developing parent and community relationships, reflecting teacher perceptions of who is an ‘amateur’ and who is the ‘professional’. Although teacher/parent relationships have also traditionally been seen as important for quality early years education, teacher voices in this study demonstrate that this policy aim is at the same time challenging, in relation to their attitudes towards parents, and to their role and perception of themselves as profes-sionals. Slovak national policies that govern early years teacher professionalism, such as the vocational pedagogical secondary school curriculum, and the System of Study Fields (Sústava študijných odborov 2002), and that define the graduate profile and mandatory units of university programmes for early years teachers, support the teachers’ views. The curriculum and teacher education policies do not explicitly state that teachers should be prepared for teacher–parent partnerships, or that positive attitudes towards such partnerships should be developed.

Recently, a regulatory draft document for the teaching profession, the Profession Standard: Pre-Elementary Education Teacher (Profesijný standard 2014) has been developed. It reflects

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similar attributes. The intended purpose of this document is to address concerns with respect to the early years profession, such as evaluation of teachers’ professional competence, teachers’ ongoing professional development, and teacher self-assessment practices and programmes. While this document recognises teachers’ work in classrooms, and their focus on child-oriented activities, it fails to recognise the importance of teachers’ attitudes and professionalism, particularly towards parents, and to building relationships with the wider community. Teachers’ attitudes are crucial in the development of positive parent/community relationships, as is demonstrated in other countries’ curriculum documents and frameworks, such as in Te Whāriki in New Zealand, where parent and community relationships are a key curriculum focus (Ministry of education 1996). By highlighting these contradictory positions and challenges, the analysis in this article opens up possibilities for re-thinking the actual orientations and attitudes towards pedagogies, teacher roles and professionalism, families and communities, but also, crucially, their importance and impact on children and their early education.

In the sense of ‘writing the self’, teachers express their personal and professional chal-lenges through the online discussions. While they mostly reflect an empathetic and sup-portive attitude, this is countered with posts by teachers reflecting on their practice and sense of being a professional when faced with challenges, especially by parents. Only a few posts by teachers demonstrate an understanding of parents’ perspectives, and most of them highlight a perception of parents as non-professionals, or ‘amateurs’: ‘No amateur is going to interfere with what I do with the children. If parents don’t accept our conditions then, fine, they are free to take their children elsewhere’. In this sense, early years teachers define their identity as professional, in striking opposition to their view of parents and their knowl-edge and experiences. Parents become considered as having ‘non-professional’ opinions with unreasonable requests and ideas about children’s education, experiences, performances and development. Teachers in the discussions emphasise their specialist didactic and psy-chological episteme of child development, and hold up their qualifications, professional development and university degrees to support their status: ‘We’re professionals, aren’t we? We’re not going to lower ourselves to the level of some mums, we’re miles better than them at using our arguments’. Other teachers’ postings urge and call for a strengthening of the professional identity of early years teachers:

Today really eVeRyBODy or ANyBODy interferes in our teaching profession and our competence, about how and what we should do [our job]. Medical doctors also work with children, and nobody dares to speak about their professionalism. We mustn’t let it be done to our profession, teachers!!! … We let anybody without qualifications conduct work as a child professional … it is important to work with parents, and tell them that we, teachers, are professionals with relevant qualifications and we know what to do with their children and why!!!

The range of attitudes presented by early years teachers within their online discussion is extremely varied. Attitudes towards what it means to be a professional are frequently presented, and teachers repeatedly declare themselves to be a positive professional community, focused on a love of their occupation, a love of children and particular characteristics such as creativity. This attitude is mostly based on affirming affective characteristics, for example, ‘There’s no need to talk about it, early years teachers are creative, resourceful, simply the best’, or ‘Thank you … the entries [in the Facebook discussion] are amazing and I am staggered how creative early years teachers are in all areas of their profession’. Such self- confirmation and identity building through labels

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reflect traditional early years teacher attitudes and practices in Slovakia. In the past, freedom, creativity and child-focused education have been perceived as essential prin-ciples of an early years teacher’s professionalism (Ministerstvo školstva Slovenskej republiky 1999), and Slovak early years teachers perceive their profession as following a tradition of competencies rather than outcomes/performance-based pedagogies as they observe in other countries (Potsi 2014). They do not emphasize children’s perfor-mance outcomes, or a focus on school readiness, stating, for example, ‘…we should be able to choose freely how we want to teach something, so children understand it and we can adapt it to their level … it’s why I love this job’. The Slovak teachers’ evaluation of their own creativity is also present in online discussion entries debating various art and props made with or for children. Such teacher self-evaluation entries appear almost daily, demonstrating teachers’ pride in sharing artefacts, and emphasising what is per-ceived as the positive outcome of their work within the professional community.

In particular, what teachers consider as defining their professionalism are those products made by teachers for children. While designated as useful for ‘children’s art activities’, it is the teachers’ designs and plans that they share and admire. The mutual appreciation of each other’s dedication and creativity is seen as representing the teachers’ professional attitude and orientation towards their professional identity. The discussions demonstrate a sense of belonging to the field of pedagogy driven by their ‘art creativity’ and emphasise this as contributing to their professional status. Teachers use affirmations such as ‘amazing’, ‘won-derful’ and ‘beautiful’ in appreciation of the mutual inspiration, as they explicitly evaluate the creativity of each other’s posts. They pride themselves on their creations and share photos or video recordings of rehearsed performances by children presented on various occasions. As one teacher states ‘simply: ... teachers have an excellent sense of beauty and creativity’. However, while on the one hand, teachers admire each other’s creativity by showing excited and sincere appreciation, other entries argue that the teachers’ creativity, without children’s engagement, has questionable pedagogical value, such as this entry following the appre-ciation of an art product in a debate on creativity:

It’s really beautiful, and I appreciate [the teacher’s] creativity, but, and please don’t misunder-stand me, it’s difficult to judge from one photo how much of it has been made by kids. It looks too perfect to be made by kids’ tiny hands. If it is the children who have mastered that, then all my admiration to teachers, it’s very clear how much time they devote to kids, but I can’t help thinking it’s an adult’s work – I’m just wondering: no offense.

Creativity seems to be a strong element in the teachers’ understanding of their profession-alism. For example, as Alena, early years teacher (2013) argues, ‘there is no precise manual for planning activities, it depends on a teacher′s creativity and experience, more than in any other field of education …’. Furthermore, Katka (2012) claims, that ‘when a teacher is creative there are no issues with kids [behaviour] …’. Teachers thus value creativity as an integral part of their identity as professionals, and one teacher attempted to theorise different modes of early years teachers’ creativity:

My dear colleagues, as for teachers’ creativity: I tend to divide it into four categories: (1) creative teachers; (2) teachers who think that they are creative, while the opposite is true; (3) teachers who don’t even think about trying to be creative (4) others … (I put myself in this category).

Overall, the online discussions point to the mutual appreciation of teachers’ aptitude and focus on teachers’ creative processes and outputs as demonstrations of their professionalism.

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The rarity of questions asking about children’s learning, and, as Petra asks above, their con-tribution to the creative process, art activity or governance within the early years setting, points to the complexity of teacher professionalism and to the significant impact of histor-icised experiences and teachers’ ability to synthesise them with contemporary developments. This is further evident in the qualification and curriculum landscape.

Qualifications, identities and tensions

The teachers’ online discussions also respond to tensions around what qualifications lead to a teacher being considered as a professional. As in many countries, there are discrepancies between formal qualifications of the early years workforce, which in Slovakia range from high school specialist pedagogy diplomas (currently around 60% of the workforce), to uni-versity degrees, postgraduate qualifications and teachers with a Ph.D. Some of the early years teachers perceive this discrepancy as an issue: ‘We won’t move forward, won’t stay united and we’ll be divided into high school graduates, and those with degrees …’. In Slovakia, pre-primary non-compulsory education is provided for children aged three to six years. Pre-school education is provided mainly by public Kindergartens governed by local munic-ipalities, which follow a national curriculum prescribed by the Ministry of education of Slovakia. There are also a small number of private and church kindergartens, and also nursery centres for infants and toddlers. However, nursery centres are not officially recognised as providing the pre-school education or activities that a kindergarten offers. Tensions between early years teachers are elevated by the fact that, even with different levels of qualifications, their job descriptions, duties and professional roles and responsibilities are the same. levels of qualification are however recognised in higher salaries for teachers with higher qualifications.

Complex curricular reforms in Slovakia in 2008 opened a space for even greater differen-tiation among early years teachers in Slovakia. In 2008, Slovakia adopted an early years education policy that for the first time incorporated early years settings into the general – compulsory – education system with detailed educational standards. This move represents a major break from Slovak policy traditions (Pupala, Petrova, and Mbugua 2013), and as a result, undergraduate and postgraduate university courses for early years teachers have undergone extensive review and expansion. For instance, in the past five years, work to standardise the teaching profession, including early years teachers, has intensified, culmi-nating in attempts to regulate teachers within professional standards. Tensions for teachers arising from such a shift are also reflected in the online discussions:

Teachers’ views on the qualification system … it is like walking on eggshells, I’m not an expert, but this is what I constantly hear [from other teachers] and it is really unpleasant. Some teachers are jealous, but it is not us who proposed the system, we’re just blamed for having university degrees.

The 2008 legislative and curricular transition to more standards-based early years education created the expectation that teachers with degrees would develop the local curriculum and relevant pedagogies to meet curricular goals. At the same time, this had an exclusionary effect on high school graduate teachers who have been in the field for a considerable time, but have little experience with, and knowledge of, standards-based terminology and cur-riculum development. The 2008 national curriculum introduced a comprehensive terminol-ogy shift, from competencies, to standards, taxonomies and various psychological

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categorisations (Kascak and Pupala 2013). The analysis of the online discussions shows how teachers who have a higher qualification positively identify with such a terminology. In 2008, teachers with higher degrees perceived the new curriculum document as legitimating what was seen as their ‘academic supremacy’ over other teachers without them, no matter how experienced they were in the profession. The new policy document thus has validated their identity as leading professionals, and created a rift within the teaching workforce. For instance, teachers with higher qualifications called for the use of specialist professional jargon amongst teachers:

… a teacher is a teacher precisely because she should be capable of accepting new things as well, and so slightly more difficult terminology isn’t going to put us off. Anyway, we don’t pass on the jargon to the children, but at least amongst ourselves we can ‘talk shop’ at a higher, more specialized and sophisticated level’…

… we [teachers] are very cautious about teaching methods because it isn’t covered [at voca-tional pedagogical secondary school], and not everyone has or will have a degree. During the seminars on the reforms of the curriculum content I discovered that some people were surprised [with the discourse].

These more highly qualified teachers who invoke specialist language emphasise their open-ness to change, their ability to teach and to accept innovative ideas. They see themselves as innovators and they perceive the 2008 national curriculum as a new opportunity. They iden-tify with the 2008 national curriculum, and often they were involved in mentoring other early years teachers and staff at that time of its development. However, the experienced teachers without higher qualifications exhibit a more relaxed attitude to the use of ‘jargon’. They often reject appeals for more specialised language and knowledge use in the everyday discourse, and argue for more focus on experiences and practice:

I admit that after 21 years of experience I feel no need to know Bloom’s taxonomy. I know it exists and I know what it’s for but I can’t remember it off the top of my head … what’s the point? I know what a child can do and should be able to do at a particular stage …

However, a growing number of teachers with higher qualifications overwhelmingly perceive the use of jargon as one of the basic definitions of their professionalism in Slovakia. The use of specialised vocabulary in planning, reporting and informal debates with other teachers is reflective of outcomes/performance-based attitudes towards the function of early years education (Potsi 2014). These understandings of early years teachers’ professional identities are different from other countries, where outcomes/performance-based attitudes are largely rejected in early years teacher professional discourses (Arndt and Tesar 2016a; Mclachlan, Fleer, and edwards 2010), and the focus is on promoting everyday inclusive language and relationships.

In the online discussions, more highly qualified early years teachers stress their abilities to learn new ideas that become introduced to their professional roles. They justify their distinction from high school diploma teachers, by emphasising their academic competence as opposed to their experience and practice. The policy for regulating early years teachers in Slovakia does not offer support with such conceptual tensions: on the contrary, the tension is strengthened through the legislation. On the one hand, governing agencies declare (to meet OeCD expectations) that they support the notion of requiring early years teachers to hold a Bachelor’s degree, as the mandatory qualification for working in this field (Tahuma, litjens, and Makowiecki 2012); however, this idea is not enforced or fully supported in prac-tice. Moreover, regional governing agencies, which are responsible for the regulation of early

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years qualification structures for public early years settings, create benchmarks that support less qualified teachers, partly because, as articulated in the online discussions, they are less financially demanding upon the early years settings’ budget. However, the tensions are further deepened by the fact that all teachers in early years settings continue to have the same responsibilities and roles, regardless of their qualifications. This tension is often rep-resented in the online discussions. The Slovak Ministry of education and regional governing agencies approach qualifications in contradictory ways, further hindering teachers’ sense of belonging, professional identity and sense of division in the workforce. A statement by a Ministry of education representative reinforces these discrepancies and divisions:

We can ask whether it is good, whether it is correct, that we have such a scattered teacher education. In my opinion I can’t see it as a problem, since the number of teachers with higher education degrees, particularly with a Bachelor’s degree, has been gradually increasing. As time passes, there will naturally be a strong possibility that such a level will be reached when the ratio between teachers with high school diplomas and university degree holders will change in favour of teachers with university degrees. By no means do I want to say that teachers with high school diplomas are less competent than those with university degrees. (Hajdukova 2014)

International perspectives

A comprehensive examination of international views on professionalism exceeds the scope of this article, and has been well documented elsewhere in relation to european, other Western and non-Western countries (Arndt and Tesar 2016b; Miller, Dalli, and Urban 2012; Moss 2013; Osgood 2006). As one example, the New Zealand context is indicative of the possibilities, diversity and uncertainty arising in contemporary early years policy perspec-tives, and demonstrates that the tensions of professionalism and the professional identity of the early years workforce are not unique to Slovakia. In New Zealand, the shift of childcare services from the social welfare department to the education sector occurred in 1986, calling for a bridging of the gap between education and care (May 2013). It also supported, but did not completely change, the perception of the early years workforce as more than ‘just babysit-ters’ (Osgood 2006). More recent early years education and policy alliances in New Zealand continue to trouble these discourses. Dominated at once by rapid growth in the sector and the accompanying demands for teachers, the early years sector simultaneously struggles to retain the diverse types of provision of care and education that have catered for local com-munity needs in the past.

Another similar tension to the Slovak situation relates to qualification levels. Benchmark qualifications for early years teachers in New Zealand are either a Bachelor of Teaching (early Childhood education) or a Diploma of Teaching (early Childhood education), or other, includ-ing international, equivalent level qualifications as approved for teacher registration (TeachNZ 2015). While benchmarking qualifications must meet the Graduating Teacher Standards, designed to provide ‘certainty in the quality of all graduates’ (New Zealand Teachers Council 2007), issues arise when more qualified teachers vie for positions alongside un- or less-qualified teachers. Technologies of normalisation, implemented to ‘simplify’ con-flicting positions in relation to early years teacher professionalism, have led to a narrow focus on economic practicalities (Moss 2007), and, similarly to the Slovak Ministry statement, side-step the ideal of a highly qualified teacher workforce. With government intervention and lowering of professional recognition and status, the neoliberalisation of education in New

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Zealand (Codd 2008) mimics an international tendency towards increasingly uncritical main-streaming of policy. This tendency ignores the complex entanglements of individual, local and professional realities and emotions of teachers, such as the perceptions of professional identity illustrated by the Slovak online discussions.

The Slovak teachers demonstrate agency and power in their contributions to the online discussions, in particular when asserting their difference. What emerges in these discussions is teachers’ strong sense of being misunderstood, by those who are less qualified, by teachers who have been in the field for a long time, or, most distinctly, by parents (mothers specifi-cally). Seen alongside concerns with conceptions of professionalism in New Zealand, there appears to be a different focus on professionalism. In New Zealand, there seems to be a rising resistance to neoliberal, hegemonising techniques to ‘smooth over’ and ensure uni-versal practices (for instance, through imported behaviour management programmes (Arndt, Gibbons, and Fitzsimons 2015)). While teachers in both countries are engaged in a range of professional struggles, in New Zealand, there is a concern with the failure of imported pro-grammes to respond to situated, localised realities, and in Slovakia, teachers appear to be more concerned with upholding their strong perception of professional identity. Unpredictability in a market-driven economy has proven to have complex repercussions for early years education in New Zealand (Tesar 2015a, 2015b), driving teachers unwittingly into victim/supporter roles in the system.

Implications for professionalism

What can be learnt about teacher professionalism by exploring teacher attitudes and edu-cational landscapes? Foucault’s (1991) work on power and its relationship with institutions has guided this examination of the influences of government on teacher professionalism. The concern with the productive nature of power arises from the policy initiatives in political ideologies and regulatory institutions in Slovakia, and the production of teacher subjectiv-ities and their orientations towards their profession and professionalism. Recent policy ini-tiatives in Slovakia have strongly impacted on teachers’ attitudes to their roles and identities in not only repressive, but also productive ways. For early years teachers in Slovakia, mount-ing tensions in perceived levels of professionalism and professional identity arise largely in relation to a new curriculum and levels of teacher qualifications, while at the same time, opening up fresh possibilities and concerns in the exploration of both issues.

Still relatively new social networking opportunities, such as online discussions, have cre-ated an agentic space for change that has empowered teachers as social activists and allowed them to have their voices heard within their profession. While from a Foucauldian perspec-tive, these teachers are seizing an opportunity to exercise their productive power, in a Havelian sense, they are disturbing the comfort of previously accepted private/public under-standings of early years teacher subjectivities and professionalism. They are rupturing Havel’s notion of living in a particular system that forces the withdrawal from the public sphere into the private spaces of life. Rather than living merely as victims and supporters of the system, these teachers are acting out the role of rebels of the system, re-situating what was previously relegated to the private domain, into a public professional online forum.

In one sense, the assumption by more highly qualified teachers of a superior view of their own professionalism could be seen as a form of top-down power relations, similar to one experience of neoliberal economic forces, when qualification requirements changed in New

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Zealand, for example. In a Foucauldian sense, however, the power exercised in the Slovak early years teachers’ agentic activism is not necessarily oppressive, but harnesses and exploits opportunities to create spaces of resistance through their own, hitherto subjugated knowl-edge. The fresh nature of this increasingly public debate, in the still protected, relatively safe and anonymous space of the online forum, elevates opportunities for voicing, arguing, explaining and most importantly, reconceptualising teacher concerns and knowledge. Teachers’ voices become directly involved in the development of new understandings of what might be meant by the greater good of early education, and by teacher professionalism.

Concluding comments

This article analyses some of the ‘complexities of professional identity’ that have emerged in an analysis of early years teacher voices in online discussions in Slovakia. In the context of the contemporary shifting workforce and early years landscape, the tensions and concerns have been discussed in relation to struggles with the notion of professionalism. That the Slovak concerns are not necessarily unique is indicated by a brief insight into concerns with professionalism in New Zealand. The rethinking and reconceptualisations opened up in this analysis can draw strong inspiration from the large body of research that refocuses peda-gogies on the relational nature of children’s lives, being, learning, and their localised place, community contexts and multiple realities (Dahlberg, Moss, and Pence 2013; Ritchie and Skerrett 2014; Taylor 2013).

The key issues that teachers focused on in Slovakia are creativity and the development of creative resources, teacher/parent/community inclusion in early years settings, teacher qualifications, and questions of who counts as a professional and who counts as an ‘amateur’. Intersections and contradictions in policy and practice appear to increasingly align the Slovak context with international views, as demonstrated here through the consideration of the New Zealand context. Importantly, however, the issues arising in these discussions are, and must remain, located within the Slovak context. Foucault’s and Havel’s conceptions of power, and implications of contextual systemic pressures and controls have provided insights into implications for professionalism in the online discussion forums. Teacher discussions have reflected the power that inheres between the public and private realms, as teachers confi-dently express in the forum what they hide in the openness of their early years kindergarten settings, for example, as public victims and supporters of the early years system. In this way, they confirm their self-governance within the forum, and the agency that is gained. Using Tesar’s (2014) Havelian lens, this affirms their adoption of a position not only as victims and supporters, but also as challenging the system.

In Havel’s analyses of complex power relations, every citizen and group of people has access to power. The Slovak early years teachers’ online discussions, in a certain sense, rupture the status quo to make power available to all early years teachers. The fluid and free nature of power that the early years teachers who belong to this forum can harness and have access to, demonstrates Havel’s (1985) ‘power of the powerless’ and creates the possibility to not only write the professional self, but to provide pressure and to influence shifts in the early years teachers’ everyday work life and sense of professionalism. Power takes on different forms, structures and flavours. For early years teachers in Slovakia claiming their power through online discussions, it seems that Havel’s notion of disturbance and rebellion is not

200 M. TeSAR eT Al.

only an aspiration for the future, but is occurring now. Policy landscapes, it seems, can shift teacher attitudes then – in unpredictable, unexpected ways, for the powerful and for the powerless.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Funding

This work was supported by eCReA Award [grant number 2015]; KeGA [grant number 005TTU-4/2015]; VeGA [grant number 2/0140/15], [grant number 1/0057/15].

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