Pre-service early childhood educators’ career motivations: moving from a thematic analysis to recognising the performative nature of talk and text

Encouraging students to reflect on their decisions to become early childhood educators and explore their future intentions is commonly employed in pre-service programmes. Notwithstanding the value of such tasks, research has tended to downplay the constructed and performative nature of such responses. This paper explores the performative nature of pre-service early childhood educators’ texts when asked to reflect on their reasons for choosing their career. Highlighting the sequentially, institutionally and rhetorically situated nature of their discourse, the paper argues that such discursive constructions can be used as resources by early childhood educators to interrogate the idealised images of their profession. The paper further argues that highlighting the presence of particular discourses that are privileged in early childhood education may help develop early childhood educators’ resilience and help address issues of retention.