Stories of Professional Identity Authored by Early Childhood Educators in Yukon
Bibliographic record
Abstract
In the face of increased public interest and government investment, Canadian policy makers and early childhood educators (ECEs) now have choices to make about the meaning and purpose of early childhood education within this country. The choices made now will have a considerable impact on the lives of our youngest children and those who devote their lives to learning with them. This study fills a gap in research in the field of early childhood education and gives visibility to Early Childhood Educator’s experiences that led them into the early learning field and how they conceptualize and experience their work. Grounded within a social constructivist perspective, this study dances with a bricolage approach to research that weaves together feminist epistemology, ethnographic research, a figured worlds framework, the hundred languages of children, a pedagogy of listening and a life history approach to describe and gain meaning from stories of becoming and being an ECE in Yukon. The findings make visible how dominant discourses, workplace contexts, and the larger structures of the field of ECE and our society, interact with ECEs’ negotiation of their professional identities. Prevalent within the stories of being an ECE in Yukon was a culture of isolation that stemmed from the current governing system and the market model approach to early learning that dominates the field. Findings aligned with previous research and revealed that the image of early childhood education in Yukon is shaped by dominant discourses that are steeped in issues related to gender, a persistent care vs education dichotomy, and economic investment discourses (Arndt et al., 2021; Langford et al., 2017; Lightfoot & Frost, 2014; MacDonell & McCorquodale, 2019; Moss, 2006; Moss 2004; Tukonic & Hardwood, 2016; Tukonic & Hardwood, 2017; Woodrow, 2007). Participants' stories highlighted a pervasive culture of isolation in the field, leading to feelings of being unseen and unheard, and ultimately, the rejection of an Early Childhood Educator professional identity in Yukon. The overarching findings indicated that while current investments within the field have the potential positivity influence societal perceptions and working conditions for ECEs there is still a long way to go before the early childhood education in Yukon is recognized and valued as a profession. Ultimately, ECEs in Yukon remain undervalued and underappreciated.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.003 | 0.011 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.027 | 0.017 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.009 | 0.006 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.010 |
| Research integrity | 0.004 | 0.006 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".