53.2 Starting Strong: Critical Perspectives
on the ECE Teaching Profession
‘Starting Strong’is a theme used in a series of international reports by the OECD.
The reports highlight the emphasis on early childhood professional knowledge and
its relationship to quality ECE. The Starting Strong reports consolidate and build on
existing professional knowledge and practice and align with current scholarship on
pedagogy, professionalism and leadership in ECE (Dalli 2008 ; Osgood 2012 ;
Woodrow 2008 ). This scholarship consistently advocates for effective models of
development to emanate from within the profession, grounded in the contexts and
aspirations of teachers, and critically attuned to the complexities of centre com-
munities (Dalli et al. 2012 ). The idea of starting strong is a metaphor that may also
be applied to the ways in which teaching teams work in early childhood centre
communities, and the ways in which teacher education supports the professional
work of teaching teams.
In Aotearoa New Zealand, the situating of professional development within
centre communities is arguably evident in new strategic directions for initial teacher
education (Education Council 2016 ) that focus on the role of mentor teachers
during the practicum components of a teaching qualification. The emphasis here
appears to be on continuing to address perceived dissonance between theory and
practice (Gibbons et al. 2015 ). This concern was central to government-funded
research partnerships known as Centres of Innovation (COI). The development of
the COI programme reflected the importance of early childhood teachers and
researchers strengthening their professional connections (see for instance Meade
2010 ). COI research focused on teacher-led participatory action-research models
that developed pedagogical and research capacity and capability. In addition,
professional development through the Educational Leadership Programme has been
instrumental in putting forward a distributed leadership model focussing on centre
practices and innovative education and the idea of teacher-led participatory models
influenced by Kaupapa Māori models of sharing knowledge and responsibility
based on concepts of Ako and Ata. Other countries have developed unique ini-
tiatives in terms of policy discourses in early childhood education (see, for example
a series of articles in the special issue ofInternational Journal of Early Years
Education(Calder 2015 ).
Arguably, the early childhood profession is a site of active, free and open
discussion and dissonance on the nature and role of the teacher. Different per-
spectives on the importance of qualifications and the necessary knowledge within a
teaching qualification entail complex negotiations that are regularly repositioned,
rearticulated and reconceptualised. This complexity requires care in making
assumptions about what being a teacher means, and what beingnew,orabeginner,
or anexpertmeans, within a teaching team. Hence opportunities to discuss, for
instance, tensions between theory and practice are valuable for teaching teams.
They are valuable as they‘re-place’the teacher in her teaching (Duncan 2004 ;
Middleton and May 1997 ; Osgood 2012 ) and promote a critical awareness of how
788 M. Tesar et al.