Performing the (religious) educator’s vocation. Becoming the ‘good’ early childhood practitioner in Chile

ABSTRACT

In this paper, I discuss how professional identities in early childhood education in Chile are performatively constituted within the interplay between a religious discourse of vocation and gender. ‘Having the vocation’ has become a regime of truth that regulates and governs educators’ behaviours, motivations and relationships in their workplace. By deconstructing the concept of vocation through a poststructuralist and feminist theory, I show the arising tensions in this discourse, emphasising that it positions female early childhood educators as a subject of both exploitation and admiration. Vocation shapes early years practitioners not only as nurturing and caring, but deeply altruist, devoted and self-sacrificed women seeking (eternal) salvation. Exposing the contradictory nature of this discourse, the article highlights its tensions with the professionalization of the early years workforce. Whilst vocation situates practitioners as good educators and morally good women, it allows for workforce exploitation, trapping them in hazardous working conditions.

KEYWORDS:

• Vocation
• professional identity
• gender
• performativity
• early childhood education

Acknowledgments

I am grateful to Dr Guy Roberts-Holmes and Prof. Phil Jones (UCL Institute of Education) for their supervision of this study and the thorough review of this manuscript and Dr Ximena Galdames (Faculty of Education, Universidad Diego Portales) and the two anonymous reviewers of the journal for her helpful comments.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes on contributor

Ximena Poblete Nuñez is as lecturer in the Psychology department at Universidad Andres Bello in Santiago (Chile), while finishing her PhD in Education at UCL Institute of Education. She holds an MA in International Education and Development from University of Sussex (UK) and a BA in Psychology at the Pontificia Universidad de Chile. She is also a founding member and researcher at the Centre of Studies in Early Childhood (CEPI) in Chile. Her research interests are early childhood education and teacher training and development.

Notes

1 I use the terms educator and practitioner indistinctly, as the former is used in Chile to refer to professional ECE workers and differentiate them from school teachers and assistants.

Additional information

Funding

The research of this paper was funded by the CONICYT-BECAS CHILE PAI/INDUSTRIA 72140251 and sponsored by the Centro de Investigación Avanzada en Educación – CIAE.