Professionalization as an advocacy strategy: a content analysis of Canadian child care social movement organizations’ 2008 discursive resources

Abstract

Do early childhood education and care (ECEC) professionals make good advocates? Canadian advocates have fought for better child care policies since the mid-1940s. What has happened to this advocacy with the recent increased professionalization of the ECEC sector? How does increased professionalization limit, innovate or expand advocacy strategies? This content analysis of seven Canadian child care social movement organizations’ discursive resources in 2008 examines how different types of child care social movement organizations communicated their positions to their members and the public to manage a changing economic and political climate. Preliminary findings indicate that both ECEC workforce sector associations and grassroots organizations shared common advocacy messages, played down problems associated with a market approach to child care, and framed child care as a business case in their messaging. The authors suggest this reflects a nascent discursive move towards the professionalization of Canadian child care movement advocacy messages.

Key words:

• Canadian child care movement
• social movement organizations professionalization
• child care policy

Notes

1. Data limitations: our analysis relies on documents that were publicly posted on SMO websites. It is possible that organizations campaigned without posting to their websites, so texts generated by these activities were excluded from this analysis. We are mindful that maintaining a website is labour-intensive, particularly for volunteer-based groups like the grassroots SMOs in our sample. Nevertheless, we assume websites feature documents that are of high priority to the organization, which warrants their use in this analysis.