Shaping Professionalism in Early Childhood Education and Care: Identity, Learning, and Workforce Development

Dear Colleagues,

Professionalism in Early Childhood Education and Care (ECEC) is undergoing considerable examination as the ECEC sector navigates shifting expectations, increasing policy demands, and changes in workforce composition. These developments provoke important questions about what it means to be a professional in ECEC, and how identity, learning, and organisational conditions shape that understanding in practice. Central to this conversation are the ways early childhood professionals make sense of their work, engage in professional learning, and negotiate their identities within complex and varied settings.

This Special Issue, Shaping Professionalism in Early Childhood Education and Care: Identity, Learning, and Workforce Development, invites contributions that examine these complex matters and extend understandings of professionalism in the field. We welcome full empirical studies—qualitative, quantitative, or mixed methods, as well as theoretical, conceptual, and methodological papers that illuminate how professional identity is formed, sustained, and supported across diverse ECEC contexts.

We encourage submissions that bring forward innovative methodological approaches, new models of professional learning, and critical perspectives on professionalism. Collectively, the articles in this Special Issue aim to deepen understanding of the evolving nature of professionalism in ECEC and to identify the conditions required to foster a confident, capable, and sustainable workforce.

Suggested foci include, but are not limited to, the following:

• Professional identity trajectories across career stages;
• The influence of organisational culture, leadership, and policy on professional identity;
• Identity tensions, negotiations, and micropolitics in practice;
• Innovative or communityembedded professional learning models;
• Professional learning in rural, remote, Indigenous, or culturally diverse contexts;
• Conditions shaping job satisfaction, wellbeing, and career pathways;
• Policy reforms and their impact on workforce professionalism;
• Ethical dilemmas and decisionmaking in ECEC;
• The relationship between professionalism and quality measures;
• Advocacy, rights-based practice, and civic professionalism;
• Critical perspectives on professionalism;
• New conceptual models for understanding professional practice;
• Professionalism in multi-agency or integrated service settings;
• Organisational policies and their influence on autonomy and agency.

We look forward to your contributions to this Special Issue.

Dr. Leanne Gibbs
Dr. Mandy Cooke
Guest Editors

Manuscript Submission Information

Manuscripts should be submitted online at www.mdpi.com by registering and logging in to this website. Once you are registered, click here to go to the submission form. Manuscripts can be submitted until the deadline. All submissions that pass pre-check are peer-reviewed. Accepted papers will be published continuously in the journal (as soon as accepted) and will be listed together on the special issue website. Research articles, review articles as well as short communications are invited. For planned papers, a title and short abstract (about 250 words) can be sent to the Editorial Office for assessment.

Submitted manuscripts should not have been published previously, nor be under consideration for publication elsewhere (except conference proceedings papers). All manuscripts are thoroughly refereed through a double-anonymized peer-review process. A guide for authors and other relevant information for submission of manuscripts is available on the Instructions for Authors page. Education Sciences is an international peer-reviewed open access monthly journal published by MDPI.

Please visit the Instructions for Authors page before submitting a manuscript. The Article Processing Charge (APC) for publication in this open access journal is 2000 CHF (Swiss Francs). Submitted papers should be well formatted and use good English. Authors may use MDPI's English editing service prior to publication or during author revisions.