Problematising constructions of ‘expert teachers’ and ‘vulnerable children’ in New Zealand Early Childhood

Abstract

Over the last two decades, early childhood education (ECE) has come to the top of the political agenda in New Zealand and internationally. The interest of governments and policy-makers in ECE has been driven by the thinking that an 'investment' in ECE is a key a country's future social and economic development (Heckman 2000). Through an interplay of the existing early childhood discourses and emerging economic discourses, the contexts in which early childhood teachers understand and undertake their work and view themselves as professionals have, thus rapidly changed (Penn 2013; Brown et al. 2018; Pupala, Kascak, and Tesar 2016). This article problematises constructions of 'expert teachers' and 'vulnerable children', which emerged through an interplay of discourses of social intervention, economic investment and vulnerability in New Zealand ECE. It argues that the identity constructions on offer have a powerful potential to reinforce social-interventionist and neoliberal narratives in ECE, and move its purpose away from the idea of collective democracy (Dewey 1976). Keywords: teacher identities; New Zealand early childhood education; early childhood policies and politics; discourses of vulnerability; poststructural perspectives