Despite the fact that high-quality preschool education is empirically acknowledged to facilitate short- and long-term personal, social, cognitive, and economic benefits, the professionals who teach preschool experience overwhelmingly poor working conditions that have historically been present as the role of childcare worker persisted throughout…

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.…

Organizational climate is a concept that may affect individual behaviors, attitudes and well-being in organizational life as well as explain why some organizations are more productive, effective, innovative and successful than others. The concept has been investigated in many disciplines such as sociology, psychology, anthropology, political…

Child care teachers' experiences and their gendered understandings of their work were explored in this study. Two female child care teachers were interviewed individually and asked to describe their work as women's work. Analysis showed that teachers essentialized child care teaching, recognized the paradoxes of being a child care teacher,…

There has been much policy interest on the theme of children's services in recent years. For example, the 1998 National Child Strategy explicitly aims to ensure good quality, affordable childcare for children aged 0 to 14 in every neighbourhood, including both formal childcare and support for informal arrangements. The sector has a changed a lot…