'I think a lot of it is common sense...' Early Years students, professionalism and the development of a vocational habitus

This paper reports on research from a small-scale project investigating the vocational training of students in Early Childhood Education and Care (ECEC) in England. We draw on data from interviews with 42 students and five tutors in order to explore the students’ understandings of professionalism in early years. In the paper, we discuss first, the then Labour Government’s drive to ‘professionalise’ the workforce and second, critically analyse the concept of professionalism, drawing on sociological literature. We then turn to the data, and argue that students’ understandings of professionalism are limited to generic understandings of ‘professional’ behaviour (reliability, politeness, punctuality and so on). The idea of their occupation being a repository of a particular knowledge and skills set is undercut by the students’ emphasis on work with young children being largely a matter of ‘common sense’. Our fourth point is to highlight the processes by which students are inducted into a respectable and responsible carer identity, as illustrated by an emphasis on clothes and appearance. We conclude that the version of professionalism offered to students training at this level is highly constrained, and discuss the implications of this

'I'm so much more myself now, coming back to work' - working class mothers, paid work and childcare

This paper explores the ways in which working class mothers negotiate mothering and paid work. Drawing on interviews with 70 families with pre-school children, we examine how caring and working responsibilities are conceptualised and presented in mothers’ narratives. Mothers showed a high degree of commitment to paid work and, in contrast to findings from an earlier study with middle class and professional mothers, did not feel that keeping their children at home with them was always the best option for the children. We suggest that working class mothers in the labour market remain at risk of being defined as inadequate mothers because of a middle class emphasis on intense maternal engagement with the child as a key aspect of ‘good’ mothering

Local links, local knowledge : choosing care settings and schools

This paper draws on data from two recently completed ESRC-funded projects in order to examine class differences and similarities around choice of school and choice of childcare. We argue here that there is every reason to believe that in many circumstances, within its particular mechanisms and practices, choice produces specific and pervasive forms of inequity.The processes by which working class parents in one study chose care settings and schools could be seen as less skilled, less informed, less careful than the decision-making of many of the middle class respondents. However, this is not an argument we advance, noting instead that the practices and meanings of choice are subject to significant social, cultural and economic variations in terms who gets to choose, who gets their choices, and what, how and why people choose when they are able to. We argue here that there are alternative sets of priorities in play for our working class respondents, involving attachments to the communal and the local

1907 : Société d’Histoire de Kaysersberg

Le 12 décembre 1907 naissait « das Altertumsverein für Kaysersberg und Umgegend ». L’association englobait Kaysersberg, Kientzheim, Sigolsheim, Ammerschwihr, Katzenthal et Ingersheim. Dès sa création, 160 membres réglèrent une cotisation de 3 marks. 1907 : la première fondation L’artisan de cette naissance s’appelait Joseph Rieder. Passionné d’histoire et de patrimoine, premier magistrat de Kaysersberg et conseiller général de 1919 à 1932, député de Ribeauvillé de 1930 à sa mort (1932), il fu..