Are We All Travelling Similar Paths to Early Childhood Professionalisation? The Case of Bhutan

Abstract

There have been repeated calls for early childhood, within Australia and internationally, to become professionalised. In Australia this often advocated in order to address disparities of status, pay, and conditions between early childhood and primary/secondary teachers. However, there are risks to the pursuit of professionalism through adherence to the education discourse. In particular, the education discourse reifies teaching and learning and problematises relationship and caring work. Much of the literature examining the professionalisation of early childhood comes from western nations, and there is little examination of the paths being travelled by early childhood in other nations. In this study a country with a very different national habitas to that of Australia, Bhutan, was chosen to explore the path taken to professionalisation in early childhood, operating on the assumption that the extreme case may offer different ways of perceiving and understanding the path to early childhood professionalisation.