Turning the kaleidoscope
Oosterhoff, Maria
DOI:
10.33612/diss.160821650
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Publication date:
2021
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Citation for published version (APA):
Oosterhoff, M. (2021). Turning the kaleidoscope: multiple enactments of professional autonomy in early
childhood education. University of Groningen. https://doi.org/10.33612/diss.160821650
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Chapter I
Introduction
1.1 Tensions in education
I have just returned home with a headache again. It is quite something, kindergarten teacher with heart and soul! My enthusiasm and job satisfaction is diminishing. It is so against my own feelings. I feel pressure, I feel that I have to act differently, I feel that the child may not be itself, but preferably ‘above average’. And if this is not the case, everything must be followed, described and ... tackled! Form after form after form after form, etc., etc., etc. You are not allowed to be the way you are, but you must become what ‘they’ want to see! Results! Performance! Output oriented! As if we have to put everything in a child ... everything is already in! It is up to us to challenge the child, to take it with us, and to make it enthusiastic, so that a child can really flourish (Wildt-Dienske & De Wildt, 2013, p. 30, translated).
This is an excerpt from one of the 101 stories that are gathered in a ‘black book’ produced by Dutch early childhood teachers in 2013 (Wildt-Dienske & De Wildt, 2013). The stories express the teachers’ deep concerns about the way Kindergarten has changed over the last decades.
Currently, it is apparent that these experiences do not stand alone. Researchers in many countries are noticing this growing dissat-isfaction among early childhood teachers, which seems to be caused by the daily pressures of current accountability policies. Accountabili-ty processes expect professionals to justify the way they perform their professional responsibilities (Fenwick, 2016). While schools should be held accountable for spending public money on intended purposes, current accountability policy is also built on the belief that monitor-ing school performance will improve the quality of education (Imants et al., 2016). Colley et al. (2007) call this latter process ‘bureaucratic re-professionalization’, which creates a fixed notion of professional-ism, ‘one which individualizes and reifies both teachers and learners as objects of technical intervention’ (p. 176). Over recent decades, the way professionals account for their activities appears to have become
increasingly demanding. It is argued that this is part of a broader ‘per-formativity discourse’ (Kelchtermans, 2012) in the field of education; ‘the demand on schools and teachers to “perform”, that is, to generate achievements in a clearly specified range of “outcomes”’ (Priestley et al., 2015a, p. 105). This performativity discourse is attracting criti-cism from researchers in a number of countries (Biesta, 2007; Jensen, 2014; Nussbaum, 2012; Osgood, 2006). Scholars have noted that in-creasing attention is being paid to a particular technical assumption of educational ‘quality’ that appears to be neutral, measurable, quan-tifiable and improvable (Biesta, 2009; Figazollo, 2013; Gorur, 2015; Kelchtermans, 2012; Lather, 2006; Stremmel et al., 2015).
In such a technical discourse, there is a risk that ‘what matters [becomes] what can be measured’ (Bradbury, 2019, p. 17). Measure-ments are not innocent and objective, but productive activities. ‘Once a measurement is in place, it acts upon the world by changing under-standings and behaviour’ (Gorur, 2015, p. 592). Comparative measure-ments, on national and international levels, are used by governments to inform their policies. League tables ensure that governments, man-agement and parents are aware of the relative performance of schools and nations, fostering a culture of competition (Biesta, 2009; Plum, 2012). That which does not become part of the calculations is in dan-ger of losing its importance to the public and policy (Gorur, 2015), which subsequently trickles down into schools, reshaping educational values and pedagogical practices (Biesta, 2009).
Currently, these forces seem to have been intensified by an in-creasing datafication of education: the availability of data, technolo-gies and algorithms which allow the measurement and representation of social life in numbers (Williamson, 2016). Large amounts of data can travel smoothly from site to site and facilitate calculation and comparison of different places. This appears to be compelling new and intensified forms of monitoring and surveillance (Jarke & Breiter, 2019).
In 2019, six years after the black book was offered to the Ministry of Education, it seems the problem remains to be solved and is part of the broad Dutch educational field. This is illustrated by a letter sent to a Dutch newspaper by a primary school teacher working in grade 8 (Sprangers, 2019, p. 22, translated):
When I entered education 30 years ago, I had the freedom to organize my lessons according to my own professional beliefs … Now, years of teaching later, I often feel I am falling short. We have lost control. We have become a cog in a system … Progressively higher demands are placed on children. They must perform at an increasingly earlier age and preferably master the
subject matter as quickly as possible, because we are in a hurry … The result: stress among children, parents and teachers.
The effects on ECE
Early childhood education and care has not escaped the increas-ing interest in the particular technical assumption of educational ‘quality’ that appears to be neutral, measurable and improvable (Moss & Dahlberg, 2008). Early childhood educators are drawing attention to specific problematic effects for young children – effects that are relat-ed to the developmental characteristics of this age group. Worldwide, teachers and researchers have indicated that external performance measures have led to an increased emphasis on teacher-centred di-dactics, an emergent standardized test culture and a narrowing of the educational content at kindergarten level (Bassok et al., 2016; Roele-veld, 2003) at the cost of time for ‘learning through play’ and child-centred pedagogies that are considered to be especially important for this age group (Bodrova, 2008; Gallant, 2009; Goorhuis & Levering, 2006; Van Oers & Duijkers, 2013; Janssen-Vos, 2012; Miller & Almon, 2009; Wildt-Dienske & De Wildt, 2013). Bradbury’s (2019) empirical work shows that increasing datafication in ECE is interacting with a shift towards ‘schoolificaton’ in UK kindergartens (p. 11), a shift to-wards didactics associated with older age groups: a stronger teach-er-centred approach, less free play, a narrowed focus on literacy and mathematics and formal grouping by ability.
Experts from the educational field and the social sciences are concerned about these effects because of the detrimental conse-quences for the development of young children. Firstly, this is be-cause schoolification comes at the expense of play. The importance of learning through play for the development of young children has been stressed for decades (Bodrova, 2008; Boland, 2015; Miller & Almon, 2009). Secondly, another threat that is cautioned against is the creasing test culture in pre-primary education. Frequent testing in-creases the pressure on performance, leading to less room for young children to develop at their own pace. This is particularly a danger to the self-image and self-confidence of children who fall behind ‘the norm’ (Goorhuis, 2012; Goorhuis & Levering, 2006). Finally, attention has been drawn to the danger that a one-sided emphasis on the core subjects of mathematics and language will be at the expense of broad personal development (Janssen-Vos, 2012). In addition, specifically at this early age, it is important to address the full range of developmen-tal domains in conjunction, in particular, emotional, sensory, motor and language development, to build brain structures that enable the learning of more abstract and distinct skills at later ages (Goorhuis, 2014; Oenema-Mostert, 2012; Oenema-Mostert et al., 2018).
These changes to ECE seem not only to affect the development of children in a problematic way, but are also problematic to the profes-sionals in the field who perform their daily work ‘with heart and soul’ (Wildt-Dienske & De Wildt 2013, p. 30). Researchers worldwide have reported that teachers are feeling forced to act against their own pro-fessional knowledge and values (Day & Gu, 2007; Kelchtermans, 2012; Moss & Dahlberg, 2008; Osgood, 2006). Hence, their professional au-tonomy2, provisionally conceptualized as the space to make decisions
based on professional judgements, is being thwarted.
The importance of professional autonomy
The professional autonomy of teachers has often been claimed to be paramount in safeguarding or improving the quality of education. Researchers have drawn attention to the complexity and variability the educational context and the irreducible uncertainty of working with people (e.g., Champy, 2018). Professional teachers need space to decide, on the basis of their knowledge and experience, what is pedagogically most desirable in unpredictable daily practice (Biesta, 2011; Bleach, 2014; Kelchtermans, 2012). Other researchers have em-phasized that top-down decisions about educational improvements often lack support in daily practice (Fullan, 2007; Wenger, 2010). Ful-lan (2007) and Wenger (2010) point out that the implementation of ed-ucational reforms requires time to reach a common understanding of the assumptions and values underlying an innovation. Based on this understanding, teachers can reject, accept or adapt an externally im-posed change to their own situation. Furthermore, autonomy has been found to affect job satisfaction, motivation, stress levels and profes-sionalism (Day & Gu, 2007; Kelchtermans, 2012; Pearson & Moomaw, 2005; Ryan & Deci, 2000; Van den Broeck et al., 2008). This generally recognized importance of professional autonomy and identifying the tensions between external regulation and autonomy in the ECE field, has prompted me to conduct an in-depth study on this topic embed-ded within Dutch ECE.
Dealing with tensions
Kelchtermans (2012) argues that it is important that teachers themselves take a position with respect to what he calls the ‘per-formativity discourse’. The empirical work of Kelchtermans and Ballet (2002) demonstrated that micropolitical literacy, ‘the competence to understand the issues of power and interests in schools’ (p. 765), is important in order to apply strategies to safeguard or establish de-sired working conditions. Kelchtermans and Ballet emphasize that it is important to prepare student teachers not only for their daily teach-ing tasks, but also for the political context that is inseparable from 2 I use this term from the outset, and throughout the dissertation, although its
definition in the literature is ambiguous. The next chapter will clarify how I perceive the concept of professional autonomy in this dissertation (Chapter II ‘Theoretical frameworks’).
professional practice. The motivation for undertaking this study lay precisely in the desire to explore how the initial teacher training might take up this task and support novice teachers to deal with the tensions between external regulations and professional responsibilities that they are unavoidably going to meet in their working lives. However, I realized that to be able to answer the question: ‘How to deal with the tensions in the field?’, another question needed to be investigated first: ‘What exactly is going on in this field?’
1.2 The Dutch context
The Dutch ECE context serves as a valuable case for exploring the issue of the professional autonomy of teachers for two reasons. First-ly, by law, Dutch schools are free to choose the way they design their teaching practices (Constitution, 2008, Article 23.2). Consequently, there is no prescribed standardized national curriculum, as is the case in many other countries. In the Netherlands, final learning outcomes are broadly defined by the Dutch government (Wet op het primair onderwijs, 2017, Article 9) and supervised by the Inspectorate of Edu-cation (Wet op het onderwijstoezicht, 2016). Nevertheless, efforts by the government to control daily teaching practices are encountered in Dutch schools. An exploratory report by the Dutch Education Council (Onderwijsraad, 2013), based on conversations with over 140 teachers and three commissioned studies by educational experts, revealed the effects of these trends. Due to government policies, teachers feel con-strained in carrying out their daily work and sense their professional autonomy is limited. They feel forced to act against their own profes-sional knowledge and values.
Secondly, in the Netherlands, preschool is integrated into primary school, which now educates children aged 4-12. The Dutch education system underwent an important change in 1985. Prior to this, there were two separate educational structures for ages 4-5 (preschool) and ages 6-12 (primary school). There were also distinct initial teacher training programmes: Pedagogische Academie (PA) for primary school and Kleuter Leidster Opleiding School (KLOS) for preschool. In 1985, a new primary school structure for ages 4-12 came into being, along with one teacher training programme for the entire age group (the Pedagogische Academie Basis Onderwijs (PABO) programme). From the start of this modification of the education system, concerns were raised about the degree of attention paid to the specific developmen-tal characteristics of the young child (Janssen-Vos, 2012), and this de-bate persists (Boland, 2015). Currently, both KLOS and PABO teachers teach in the first two grades. This situation enables the exploration of the probable influence of initial teacher training on the professional autonomy of the teachers.
Data from the Ministry of the Interior and Kingdom Relations (2016) reveal that, of all public service professions, the regulatory burden is by far the greatest, and task autonomy is by far the most limited, among primary school teachers. More recent statistics show that the percentage of employees in education with high task require-ments and limited autonomy increased between 2007 and 2017, from below 20% to over 30% (TNO, 2019). There is scant research on the specific situation of teachers working with young children. Statistics on Dutch primary education do not usually single out the specific sub-population of grade 1 and 2 teachers. Therefore, this study has chosen to focus on this specific group of teachers.
1.3 Research questions
The study was initiated under the professorship Early Childhood Studies of NHLStenden University, whose aim is to conduct research concerning the development of young children and educate specifically trained ECE professionals (Goorhuis-Brouwer, 2012; Oenema-Mostert, 2012). This professorship intentionally aimed to team up with ECE professionals in the field and to that end established a network group (kenniskring) that met on a regular basis. In addition, in the first year of its existence, in spring 2013, the professorship organized three round-table conferences that were attended by more than 200 ECE teachers and head teachers from primary schools in the north of the Netherlands. During these round-table conferences, tensions in the daily practices of the ECE professionals again surfaced. The teachers who attended the conferences expressed the view that they often felt forced to act against their own professional beliefs. ‘Others’ often dic-tated, or attempted to dictate, what happens in their classroom. In the exchange of thoughts about the sources of this threat to their profes-sional autonomy, a large variety of contextual factors and actors were spoken of, including: inspectorates, boards, experts, parents, col-leagues, tests, methods and more (Professorial Network Group Early Childhood, 2013).
It became apparent that the behaviour of the teachers who at-tended the conferences was, for a large part, determined by working conditions. Kelchtermans (2009) states that teachers typically work ‘in an educational system, with procedures and structures on which they have little or no influence’ (p. 14, translated). Consequently, to improve my understanding of the professional autonomy of the ECE teacher, I aimed to investigate the professional practice of ECE teachers. Thus, the overall research question posed was:
How does the workplace environment affect the professional au-tonomy of early childhood teachers?
To explore this broad overarching research question, seven spe-cific research questions were formulated. (see Figure 1.1. for an over-view). In an initial study (Study 1), the following four specific research questions were investigated:
• What are the experiences of ECE teachers regarding the extent to which they can work according their professional beliefs about good education for children aged 4-6?
• What are the experienced consequences of the situation they face?
• In what way does the workplace environment of the ECE teachers support or constrain their professional autonomy?
• How do early childhood educators respond to autonomy-limiting influences?
Two follow-up studies focused on three specific research ques-tions about some relevant key actors that appeared to be important for professional autonomy: the school management, the initial teacher
training (Study 2), and things in educational practice (Study 3):
• What is the relationship between management style, profession-al autonomy and job perception?
• To what extent do initial teacher training programmes contribute to the development of expertise?
• How do people and things together enact everyday Dutch ECE practices?
In these research questions, the phrase ‘workplace environment’ signals my intention to explore professional practice in a very broad sense: all possible (f)actors, such as people, things, discourses, poli-cies, working conditions, which are either part of the place teachers work – the schools and classrooms – or what is around that workplace, both close and further away in space and time.
1.4 Overview of the research project
The project started with an open and flexible research design that aimed to inductively investigate the professional practice of Dutch ECE teachers. The full study remained responsive to emerging re-search questions, with an open attitude to different approaches and different theoretical perspectives for exploring those questions. Ac-cording to Morse and Chung (2003) and Hesse-Biber (2010), such an open and emergent approach contributes to a richer understanding of the research topic.
Different methodological approaches
Within the time and other limitations of the project, I was able to carry out three independent studies, each applying a distinct metho-dological approach. I will briefly sketch this process here in a concise narrative, describing each study and introducing the different metho-dological approaches (see Figure 1.1). Chapter III will offer a more comprehensive account of the reasons for the overall approach, and the methods of the three studies will then be outlined in detail.
Firstly, a qualitative study was conducted aimed at exploring
the landscape. In-depth interviews were conducted with eight expe-rienced ECE teachers. The data was analysed thematically (Braun & Clarke, 2006) with the help of Atlas.ti (Friese, 2014). This approach al-lowed me to gather authentic, detailed and extensive accounts, which showed that a variety of people and things exert an influence on the teachers’ professional autonomy in complex, interrelated and some-times contradictory ways. One of the findings of this study was that tensions occurred where managerial practices contradicted teaching practices (see Section 4.1). New questions arose about precisely how
Figure 1.1 Overview of the research project: professional autonomy in ECE Study 1 Exploring the landscape – Inductive approach
Data: Open semi-structured interviews Analysis: Thermatic Analysis
Research questions:
• What are the experiences of ECE teachers regarding the extent to which they can work according their professional beliefs about good education for children aged 4-6?
• What are the experienced consequences of the situation they face?
• In what way does the workplace environment of the ECE teachers support or constrain their professional autonomy?
• How do early childhood educators respond to autonomy-limiting influences?
Study 2 Generalizing and theorizing results – Quantitative approach
Data: Survey
Analysis: Frequency distributions/Structural
Equation Modelling
Research questions:
• What is the relationship between
management style, professional autonomy and job perception?
• To what extent do initial teacher training programmes contribute to the development of expertise?
Study 3 Speaking with things –
Sociomaterial approach
Data: Initial interviews and addititonal object
interviews
Analysis: Posthuman heuristics – Following the
actors; Unraveling translations
Research questions:
• How do people and things together enact everyday Dutch ECE practices?
these tensions came about and what sustained them. Two additional studies were initiated to explore these questions.
The second, quantitative study, was aimed at generalizing and
theorizing results of the first study. The generalizing questions fo-cused on some of the influential actors, for example school manage-ment and teacher training. This second study also allowed the inves-tigation of the relationship between different theoretical concepts of autonomy that I had come across while preparing this study. Survey data were analysed with Structural Equation Modelling (SEM) using LISREL 8.80 (Jöreskog & Sörbom, 2006) to test a hypothetical model of the assumed relationships.
In the third study, I went on a sociomaterial journey aimed at
speaking with things (Adams & Thompson, 2016). The data in the first study illuminated a variety of actors that exert an influence on teach-ing practice. In addition to human actors, such as managers, colleagues and parents, the teachers mentioned a range of nonhuman things that influenced their daily practice, such as methods, tests, reports, doors and walls. During this phase of the research project, Actor-Network Theory (ANT) (Latour, 2005; Law 2009; Mol, 2002, 2010), seemed to resonate with this apparently active role of things that I was seeing. In-spired and informed by ANT, the data invited me to bring those things into the foreground and explore further questions about the active role of things in constituting everyday teaching practice. The analysis focussed in particular on how a specific standard, the Cito standard, achieves authority professional ECE practice. Posthuman heuristics (Adams & Thompson, 2016) were applied to analyse initial interview data and additional data (object interviews).
Different theoretical frameworks
In addition to different methodological approaches, different the-oretical frameworks were also employed in order to investigate the research topic. The twofold concept of professional autonomy was ex-plored using several theoretical frameworks. Professionalism, Evetts (2013) argues, is based on the trust the public must have in the work of teachers, to whom they entrust their children. In practice, however, there is and will always be a certain balance between trust and control.
Teacher Autonomy, then, Pearson and Moomaw (2006) define as per-ceived control, while Ryan and Deci (2000), using Self-determination
Theory, describe autonomy as a basic psychological need: the feeling of functioning without external pressure and having a sense of choice. Priestley et al. (2015a) expand the perspective on teacher autonomy by proposing their Ecological approach to teacher Agency, in which the capacity of actors to critically respond to problematic situations is emphasized (Priestley et al., 2015). Finally, specific attention was paid
to professional practice, in which the research project was situated.
Actor-Network Theory (ANT) (Latour, 2005) was of particular value in discerning the emerging nature of professional practices. These differ-ent theoretical frameworks complemdiffer-ent one another to some degree, but also pose some noteworthy contradictions, as will be discussed in Chapter II.
1.5 Outline of this dissertation
The dissertation is divided into three parts. The first part consists of the Chapters I, II and III, which together provide an introduction and justification of the full study. Chapter II examines the theories of relevance to this research project and how they mutually connect and disconnect. Chapter III offers an account of the reasons for choosing an emergent approach for the full study. Moreover, in Chapter III, the methods of the three studies will be outlined in detail.
In the second part, the results of the studies are presented. The Chapters IV to VIII are in the form of articles that have either been published or are in the pipeline for publication. Based on the three studies, five articles were written.
The first article (Chapter IV) is based on Study 1, ‘Exploring the landscape’, and describes how the workplace environment affects pro-fessional autonomy in early childhood education, focusing on three topics: firstly, the generally felt forces of accountability; secondly, the impact of these forces on daily educational practice, as well as on teachers’ emotions; thirdly, the role of the head teacher, who seems to be able to either enforce or inhibit those impacts.
The second article (Chapter V) presents the results of Study 2, ‘Generalizing and theorizing results’. It examines the role of profes-sional autonomy as an underlying mechanism in the way in which principals influence the job perception of teachers in the first two years of Dutch primary education. In this article, professional autono-my is operationalized as both perceived task autonoautono-my and the fulfil-ment of a basic psychological need.
The third article (Chapter VI) explores the effects of the initial teacher training programmes on the professional autonomy of the ear-ly childhood teacher vis-à-vis their impacts on teachers’ specific pro-fessional expertise. Drawing on data from Studies 1 and 2, I elucidate the vital role of early childhood teachers’ expertise in fostering their agency, and the importance of teacher education for the development of this expertise.
The fourth article (Chapter VII) draws on Study 3, ‘Speaking with things’. Based on ANT, the doings of standards are explored in pro-fessional ECE practice as part of the broader political landscape. The
reader gains a glimpse of the sociomaterial network that enacts a spe-cific standard, a Cito standard, and the chapter investigates how this particular standard, as an actor-network, seems to become powerful in some schools.
In the fifth article (Chapter VIII), I reflect on the benefits and draw-backs of the methodologically heterogeneous research design and explore the relevance of methodological heterogeneity to theory and practice.
The final part of this dissertation consists of a general discussion of the study as a whole. In Chapter IX ‘Discussion’, the overall findings are presented and discussed. Firstly, the specific research questions will be answered, based on the five articles, and the overarching re-search question will be addressed by examining the complex and in-terrelated character of workplace dynamics, or professional practices, in education. Additionally, I will elaborate on how to conceptualize the notion of professional autonomy. Furthermore, the chapter offers a critical reflection on the methodological strengths and limitations of the full research project. Throughout the unfolding research process, the study remained oriented towards the exploration of new ways of seeing and understanding, which resulted in a methodologically het-erogeneous research project. In this process, the value of the combi-nation of separate studies, distinct theories and ontologically differ-ent approaches became appardiffer-ent for an understanding of professional autonomy in ECE practice. Finally, the implications for practice of the findings of the full study will be discussed.
