Questioning identities: being and becoming a lecturer. An exploration of how early years professionals from a range of practice backgrounds are authoring themselves as University Lecturers

Williams, Karen (2024) Questioning identities: being and becoming a lecturer. An exploration of how early years professionals from a range of practice backgrounds are authoring themselves as University Lecturers. Doctoral thesis (EdD), Manchester Metropolitan University.

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Abstract

This research sets out to explore the identities of University Lecturers in Early Childhood Studies from a range of early years professional practice backgrounds, and to examine ways in which they author themselves as professionally ‘being and becoming’. The research is considered relevant in the context of ongoing discourses regarding recognition of professional status within Early Childhood Education and Care (ECEC), alongside neoliberal notions of commodification, managerialism and scrutiny in Higher Education (HE). Employment of the theoretical framework of ‘figured worlds’, adopted by Holland et al (1998), is used to examine notions of how identities may be shaped as these lecturers encounter and navigate their way through the systems and structures of their professional landscape. The research focuses on a small and specific group of participants within one post-92 university in central England. Potentiality for improvisation, imagination and agency is explored through artefact elicitation and a narrative life history approach, directing attention to the stories the participants tell of their lived experiences and understandings of their identities. Key findings draw attention to points of tension, challenge and opportunities for participants to re-imagine themselves set against the backdrop of deficit discourses and perceived lack of professional recognition. The significance of dialogue and discursive spaces emerge as central points of rupture in the familiar, expected and traditional plotlines shaping their figured worlds. In essence, what we tell each other matters. Implications are that the diversity of lecturers’ backgrounds and experiences needs to be celebrated. Dialogic spaces to articulate and affirm professional recognition through lived experiences would provide space to reimagine academic identities and benefit and enrich students, colleagues and the wider HE community.