How Do Ontario Registered Early Childhood Educators (RECEs) Understand Their Professional Identity?

The struggle for RECEs in Ontario to achieve professional status persists despite countless years of advocacy from the Early Childhood Education and Care sector. This major research paper presents findings from qualitative semi-structured interviews with twelve early childhood educators in Ontario. Feminist poststructuralism is used as a guiding theoretical framework to explore how these Ontario RECEs describe their professional identities. Two notable findings are that: (1) participants agree that four main factors make them professionals, and (2) participants resist dominant images of the ECE as a non-professional. A discussion of the findings focuses on how some Ontario RECEs appear to be moving towards a collective professional identity, in addition to engaging in individual acts of resistance to being perceived as non-professionals.