Abstract
This article critically reimagines professionalism in Ontario, Canada's early childhood education and care sector, where dominant constructions of professionalism are shaped by neoliberal, patriarchal, and colonial logics that depoliticize and devalue early childhood educators’ work. Historically, professionalism has been tied to surveillance, credentialization, and quality-control mechanisms that obscure the lived experiences of a predominantly feminized and racialized workforce. In response, the authors explore the emergence of the Association of Early Childhood Educators of Ontario's CARE Collectives—activist communities rooted in a feminist ethics of care and collective leadership. Originating from a campaign for decent work and professional pay, the CARE Collectives offer an alternative vision of professionalism grounded in relationality, emotion, and community-based activism. Drawing on narratives from Collective leads, the authors trace how these groups create spaces where professionalism is not imposed but co-created through embodied, affective, and ethical practices. This article moves beyond critique to propose professionalism as a dynamic, relational process—one that values collective becoming and affirms the political and pedagogical possibilities of care. Through this reconfiguration, the authors contribute to a growing movement to reclaim professionalism as a site of resistance, imagination, and transformation.
Keywords
Introduction
Professionalism in early childhood education and care has long been a site of policy intervention, contestation, and critique, particularly in Canada, where neoliberal reforms have worked to define, measure, and manage quality through narrow and standardized frameworks. The establishment of the College of Early Childhood Educators in Ontario marked a significant shift in the professionalization of the early years workforce, positioning educators as instrumental to national economic agendas and the shaping of future citizens. Since then, successive reforms have positioned the sector as in perpetual need of improvement, driven by discourses of “raising quality” through credentialization, curriculum mandates, inspection regimes, and surveillance-based accountability mechanisms. Within these discourses, professionalism has emerged as a central yet deeply contested construct.
Dominant constructions of professionalism in Ontario's early childhood education and care context are entangled with neoliberal, patriarchal, and colonial technologies of governance that work to universalize, masculinize, and depoliticize early childhood practice (Cannella, 1997; Langford et al., 2013; Osgood, 2006; Urban et al., 2012). Despite sustained efforts by scholars to trouble these logics, the regulation and standardization of early childhood educators (ECEs) continues unabated. These regimes of professionalization obscure the lived realities of a predominantly feminized, racialized, and working-class workforce whose care labor remains undervalued and invisibilized (Menon et al., 2024). Hegemonic narratives of professionalism not only erase diverse ways of knowing and being but also shape the affective, ethical, and relational textures of educators’ subjectivities.
At this critical juncture, we take up Benjamin's (2024: 12) invitation to “cultivate a collective vision for transforming the world” by sharing the story of the Association of Early Childhood Educators of Ontario’s (AECEO's) CARE Collectives. Emerging in 2017 from a campaign for decent work and professional pay, these regional activist communities constitute a radical reimagining of professionalism as collective, feminist, and caring. Rather than replicate dominant framings, the CARE Collectives enact a politics of affirmation by reclaiming professionalism through embodied leadership, a feminist ethics of care, and community-based activism (Menon et al., 2024). Thinking with narratives from CARE Collective leads, this article traces the emergence and evolution of the CARE Collectives as onto-epistemological spaces where professionalism is continually reimagined, co-constructed, reconfigured, and redefined. Through Black feminist thought, cruel optimism, and a feminist ethics of care, we explore how professionalism is collectively lived, sensed, and improvised rather than imposed or performed. Inhabiting professionalism as an onto-epistemological process shifts it from a fixed institutional identity to a living, collective practice of becoming, where educators remake what it means to be professional through embodied and ethical engagement. We attend to the pedagogical and political implications of centering emotion, collectivity, and relationality in reimagining professionalism.
This article begins with a critical examination of how professionalism has been historically produced in Ontario's early childhood education and care sector by foregrounding the persistent regulatory frameworks that work to delimit who counts as a professional and on what terms. Yet we move beyond critique to consider what professionalism might become when reconfigured through feminist, collective, and affective imaginaries. We ask: What stories are told about professionalism? What affects do they produce? Who do they serve? And how might we tell other stories—stories that foreground becoming-with, co-resistance, and care? By foregrounding embodied experience, situated knowledge, and political imagination, we argue for a reconfiguration of professionalism as a dynamic ecology of practices, which is less about mastery and individual status and more about collective becoming in response to the ethical, material, and affective demands of early childhood worlds. In this way, we contribute to ongoing efforts to rethink professionalism not as a static category but as an activist, relational, and generative process.
Professionalization as a double-edged sword: neoliberalism, patriarchy, and the cruel optimism of ECE professionalism
The AECEO, founded in 1950 as the Nursery Education Association of Ontario, emerged in response to the absence of state regulation and formal training for childcare workers (Association of Early Childhood Educators of Ontario, n.d.). Initially, it championed foundational reforms, introducing university extension courses, diploma programs, and voluntary certification to legitimize a field dominated by women and dismissed as “babysitting” (Cannella, 1997: 137). These efforts were undeniably progressive, yet they were also embedded within patriarchal and Eurocentric logics of professionalism that tied respect to credentialism, mirroring broader societal hierarchies that devalued care work as unskilled (Cannella, 1997).
The AECEO's work to professionalize ECEs culminated in the establishment of the College of Early Childhood Educators in 2007—a neoliberal project masquerading as professional empowerment. The AECEO had reasoned that raising the professional status of ECEs through a regulatory body would result in improved wages, working conditions, and respect. However, undergirding a capitalist ideology, professionalization became a tool to discipline ECEs into compliant subjects through conforming with certifications, codes of ethics, and standardized curricula (Ontario Ministry of Education, 2014), which served not only to elevate the profession (not the professional) but also to justify state divestment. Through the dictates of a neoliberal logic, professional accountability shifted the burden of quality onto individual educators rather than addressing structural inequities (Brown, 2019; Langford et al., 2013). The AECEO's early push to establish college programs, equivalency pathways, and regulatory frameworks became entangled in a market-based childcare system that, while professionalizing the field, also contributed to the suppression of wages and deterioration of working conditions. These developments ultimately undermined public respect for the profession in order to sustain the operational viability of privatized childcare (Langford et al., 2013).
This paradox reflects what Cannella (1997) termed the “double-edged sword” of professionalization; the very mechanisms designed to empower ECEs—for example, accreditation, surveillance, and self-regulation—intensified their precarity. The College of Early Childhood Educators' mandatory fees and continuing education requirements extracted financial and labor costs from a workforce already strained by austerity, while the state's reliance on private providers entrenched gendered and racialized exploitation (Menon et al., 2024). Professionalism, framed as a pathway to gaining respect, instead became a means to manage and moralize marginalized workers under the guise of empowerment. Connecting this reality to Berlant's (2011) concept of “cruel optimism” lays bare the affective toll of this failed promise (Menon et al., 2024). Professionalism in early childhood education and care becomes cruel when educators cling to its promise of dignity and living wages while the attachment itself is an obstacle to their flourishing. The more ECEs invest in professional development, the more they are subjected to bureaucratic demands that drain their time, income, and energy. This growing expanse between increased regulations and stagnant wages was identified as the “professionalization gap” by the AECEO (Association of Early Childhood Educators of Ontario, 2016). Berlant's (2011) framework reveals how optimism curdles into cruelty when the fantasy of professional recognition (rooted in settler-colonial and patriarchal ideals of meritocracy) actively undermines collective liberation.
While traditional notions of professionalism in early childhood education and care have been framed through credentialism, technical competence, and performativity, critical scholars such as Osgood (2006, 2012) and Cannella (1997) illuminate how these constructs function as mechanisms of control that discipline educators (predominantly women) into compliance with neoliberal and patriarchal norms. Rooted in a Foucauldian logic of regulation (Foucault, 1978), such professionalism relies on standards, codes of ethics, and assessment frameworks that produce “normalizing technologies,” framing ECEs within hierarchies of moral and technical worth. This state-imposed professionalism privileges rationality, individualism, and competition, considered masculinized traits that stand in tension with the affective, collective, and relational ethics central to early childhood education and care. As Osgood (2006) argues, the discourse of “entrepreneurial professionalism” positions educators as enterprising, capitalist, neoliberal subjects, promoting self-interest and market efficiency while eroding autonomy and obscuring the emotional and care-based labor that defines the field.
However, these dominant constructions are not uncontested. Post-structural feminist scholars (Francis, 2001; Osgood, 2006, 2010, 2012) highlight how educators actively negotiate and reimagine policy discourses, exercising forms of agency that allow them to transform professionalism from within. Drawing on ethics of care, relationality, and community, ECEs often refuse the reductive framing of their work as measurable performance and instead center emotional labor, collaboration, and collective well-being as alternative professional values. These counter-discourses destabilize managerialist ideals by reclaiming professionalism as a space of resistance and ethical commitment rather than conformity. Such refusals illustrate that while neoliberal professionalism seeks to depoliticize care, educators’ everyday practices repoliticize it, asserting a feminist professionalism grounded in care, interdependence, and justice. This overlap between traditional and alternative professionalism underscores the tension and possibility within the professionalization project that persists even within the interplay of regulatory structures, spaces of refusal, care, and collective reimagining. The challenge, then, is not simply to critique professionalism as cruel (Berlant, 2011) but to reimagine professionalism through centering care, collectivity, and refusal over respectability.
Situated knowledges, lived commitments
It is from this place of critique and imagination that we write. As ECEs, scholars, and care activists, we enter this conversation not only to acknowledge our positionality, but also to highlight our ongoing relationships and work with the CARE Collectives. Our work as leads of a CARE Collective positions us both as researchers and participants.
Nidhi: grounded in my intersecting identities as an ECE, woman, person of color, and immigrant, I serve as a CARE Collective lead working alongside racialized ECEs supporting newcomer children and families. I bring both personal and collective experiences of navigating professionalism shaped by colonialism, neoliberalism, and racism. Drawing on a feminist ethics of care, Black feminist thought, and post-structural theory, I approach professionalism as both a site of critique and a space for creative, collective reimagining. I remain committed to centering the voices and everyday struggles of racialized ECEs, and to imagining professionalism otherwise, through care, improvisation, and community.
Lisa: as a CARE Collective co-lead, I am conscious of the privilege that my identity as a white settler woman portrays to others in the spaces that I inhabit. I am committed to co-creating collective spaces of community, care, and activism. I center a feminist ethics of care in all my interactions and gatherings. This changes how I think about leadership, as not about being up front but about lifting others up. Through my lived experiences of being an ECE, I am committed to foregrounding the knowledges that come from ECEs’ lived experiences of professionalization. I imagine CARE Collective spaces as collaborative, as nurturing improvisation and care that honors each member’s capacity and contribution.
An ecology of practices needs an ecology of ideas: a collective theoretical framework
In reconfiguring professionalism as a collective ecology of practices, we understand that the practices we share and propose are not independent from an ecology of ideas, theories, philosophies, and concepts grounded in the affective turn. This work emerges from our ongoing collective thinking and writing, which traces Black feminist thought (Collins, 2000, 2008, 2022; hooks, 1984), a feminist ethics of care (Langford et al., 2017; Tronto, 2013), cruel optimism (Berlant, 2011), affect (Ahmed, 2014), and imagination (Benjamin, 2024) as central theories and concepts that move beyond critique into action. In this way, we approach professionalism not as a fixed category or identity but as a contested, felt, improvised, and co-constructed terrain shaped by histories of resistance, care, and imaginative refusal.
This narrative project tracing the Care Collectives of the AECEO is rooted in Black feminist thought (Collins, 2022; hooks, 1984) in that it challenges whose knowledge counts by intentionally foregrounding the lived experiences of racialized, classed, and gendered ECEs as valued and valuable knowledge. From this standpoint, we center the voices and narratives of the CARE Collective leaders as they deconstruct the white, neoliberal, patriarchal concept of professionalism (Collins, 2000, 2008, 2022) and reimagine a professionalism that is improvised out of the lived experience of ECEs in the impasse of intersectional oppression (Berlant, 2011; Menon et al., 2024). With Black feminist thought, we center enactments of community, care, and resistance in the narratives as powerful onto-epistemological acts of world-making that challenge neoliberal individualism and reconfigure professionalism as a feminist, ethical, caring activism (Richardson et al., 2023).
Our grounding in Black feminist scholarship (Collins, 2000, 2008, 2022; hooks, 1984) informs our work with a feminist ethics of care (Langford et al., 2017; Tronto, 2013) and holds us accountable to an intersectional understanding and embodiment of feminism as we trace the influences of feminist care ethics in the collective work of the AECEO over the last decade. What began as communities of practice created by the AECEO to bring ECEs together to advocate for their wages and working conditions transformed into CARE Collectives through the influential work of Dr Rachel Langford, who brought feminist ethics of care scholarship into early childhood education and care in Ontario, Canada. Langford et al.'s (2017) theorization of care as more than simply custodial—as a universal and essential part of our experience as humans, an ethical practice that can be evaluated and should be central to democratic policymaking—was also embodied in her personal work with the AECEO, her graduate students, and her academic colleagues. As the communities of practice evolved through the embodiment of care and caring practices passed on by Dr Langford, we came to conceptualize the advocacy of ECEs and ourselves in these spaces as caring activism (Richardson et al., 2023). Caring activism has made a way for ECEs to move between major and minor political spaces (Dahlberg and Moss, 2005; Richardson et al., 2023), supported and empowered by collective communities of care.
With these theoretical foundations and commitments, the current project continues our theorization of professionalism as cruel (Menon et al., 2024), using Berlant's (2011) concept of cruel optimism. Through the narratives of ECEs gathered in dialogic interviews, our previous work (Menon et al., 2024) traces ECEs’ affective attachments to the rewards of better wages and working conditions promised by patriarchal, neoliberal constructs of professionalism, and the cruelty that emerges as the logics of professionalism, increased workloads, and surveillance actively impede ECEs from ever reaching the promised “good life.” What Berlant (2011) called an “impasse,” we recognize as the “professionalization gap” (Association of Early Childhood Educators of Ontario, 2016) between the increased expectations of professionalization and the stagnation of wages and working conditions. We further take up Berlant's (2011) witnessing of the improvisation that takes place within the impasse as “a poetic of immanent world-making” (8), “releasing subjects from the normativity of intuition and making them available for alternative ordinaries” (6). We trace the creation of alternative ordinaries improvised by ECEs as a collective caring activism. With Ahmed's (2014) work, we further theorize the affective intensities that animate these collective spaces—anger, frustration, refusal—as necessary companions to hope and imagination. Ahmed (2014) reminds us that feminist orientations often involve being out of line, and we take seriously the discomfort, misalignment, and friction that arises when feminist ECEs reimagine the very terms of their professional lives. These are not symptoms of failure but signs of critical world-building. Most importantly, Benjamin's (2024: 8) critical work on imagination reminds us that “imagination is a field of struggle.” In our context, we treat imagination and improvisation (Berlant, 2011) as a radical, political practice, one that disrupts dominant scripts of who and what is considered professional. Rather than being tethered to aspirational models rooted in whiteness or institutional authority, imagination and improvisation become collective tools to envision and enact otherwise futures. Imagination, then, is not escapist, nor is it an “ephemeral afterthought that we have the luxury to dismiss or romanticize” (Berlant, 2011: 8); it is insurgent and deeply situated in the material realities of ECEs’ lives, particularly those living at the intersections of race, class, gender, migration, and other factors.
Methodology and methods
This study is grounded in a feminist methodological framework that centers care, relationality, and lived experience as epistemological and ethical commitments. Thinking with Black feminist thought (Collins, 2000, 2008, 2022) and affect theory (Ahmed, 2014; Berlant, 2011), we understand knowledge as relational and embodied, emerging through the emotional and ethical ties between women who live, lead, and care within early childhood education and care. Our work as leads in the CARE Collective positions us both as researchers and participants. This dual positioning reflects a feminist ethic of reciprocity, where storytelling becomes both a method of inquiry and an act of care (Collins, 2000, 2008, 2022; Kovach, 2021). The study involved conversational interviews conducted via Zoom with four CARE Collective leads and three AECEO staff members who facilitate and support our collective work. Not all leads participated; participation was voluntary and grounded in mutual respect and trust. These interviews were dialogic rather than extractive, and guided by a commitment to relational accountability (Wilson, 2008) and creating space for the emotional, affective, and political dimensions of ECEs’ professional lives. Our data comprises the narratives shared by the CARE Collective leads and AECEO staff, which we read not as static accounts, but as affective texts that illuminate how ECEs (women identifying as Black, Indigenous, LatinX, and white) resist, reimagine, and sustain professionalism from their own social locations. Through Black feminist thought and a feminist ethics of care, we approach these stories as collective acts of resistance and restoration, reimagining professionalism as a relational and caring practice.
In the following sections, we center the voices and narratives of the participants to make visible their embodied understandings of professionalism and how it can be reimagined to reflect the ethos of this special issue's call—to move beyond critique toward creative reimaginings of professionalism in early childhood education and care. Guided by Black feminist thought, a feminist ethics of care, the provocation of cruel optimism, and the radical potential of imagination, we foreground the leads’ words as anchors to make meaning with and around their stories. Through these narratives, we explore how lived experience becomes theory-in-practice, illuminating how affect—for example, anger, frustration, hope, and improvisation—shapes and reshapes what professionalism can mean and do. These stories highlight the ethical tensions and transformative possibilities that emerge when professionalism is contested, felt, and collectively reimagined in community.
Reimagining professionalism: Lyndsay MacKay, the AECEO, and the radical praxis of care
The unfinished business of professionalism
As we examine the AECEO's relationship with professionalism, we trace its transformation through the experiences of Lyndsay MacKay—an ECE, mother, and activist who guided the organization through a period of professional crisis. Her narrative moves us beyond critique to imagine new possibilities for professionalism in early childhood education and care. The AECEO's evolution under MacKay's leadership represents more than organizational change; it signals a fundamental reimagining and enacting of professionalism. Where traditional models emphasized compliance and credentialing (Osgood, 2006), MacKay's approach radically centered emotion, care, collective action, and embodied activism. Framed through a feminist ethics of care (Langford et al., 2017; Tronto, 2013), Black feminist thought (Collins, 2000, 2008, 2022), affect theory (Ahmed, 2014), and cruel optimism (Berlant, 2011), this transformation reveals how lived experience can allow ECEs to reimagine and enact professionalism differently.
The crisis: professionalism as “a sinking ship”
When MacKay became Provincial Coordinator in 2017, the AECEO faced existential threats following the creation of the College of Early Childhood Educators in 2007. As MacKay described it: “The organization was skin and bones … a sinking ship. We had an identity crisis: What is our role now?”
The College of Early Childhood Educators’ neoliberal model, emphasizing individual credentialing and mandatory membership, alienated many ECEs, who could not afford dual fees. This professionalization paradox left educators—particularly racialized and immigrant women—bearing increased burdens without commensurate compensation or respect.
Berlant's (2011) theorization of cruel optimism helps us interpret this impasse. The AECEO, and particularly MacKay's leadership, was navigating the loss of its status as a professional body—a transition that surfaced what Berlant (2011: 6) calls “questions about ideology, normativity, affective adjustment, [and] improvisation,” as well as the transformation of situated realities. Framing this moment through Berlant's lens, we understand the AECEO's re-emergence under MacKay's leadership as an instance of cruel optimism—a transformative process shaped by both ideological struggle and affective adaptation. In this context, optimism becomes a mode of survival and improvisation amid pervasive uncertainty, allowing the organization to imagine new ways of caring for and sustaining the profession.
Frustrated and angered by ECEs’ exclusion from policy discussions that focused solely on the issues of accessibility and affordability for families, MacKay centered educators’ voices through the Decent Work Project. By asking “What do you need?” rather than imposing definitions, MacKay uncovered painful contradictions: “Nobody had ever asked us that before. ECEs wanted to advocate but didn't know how.” This listening-first approach, rooted in feminist care ethics (Langford et al., 2017; Tronto, 2013), exposed the gap between the rhetoric of professionalism and educators’ realities.
Shifting from state-defined, top-down notions of professionalism toward collective and relational modes of advocacy, MacKay's work, inspired and informed by Langford et al. (2017), exemplified what Dahlberg and Moss (2005) describe as movement between major and minor political spaces. Reimagining professionalism in this way enabled MacKay and the educators to envision a different world together—one in which ECEs could truly flourish. This reimagining did not erase the nightmare of dominant, traditional constructions of professionalism; rather, it opened space for a renewed sense of purpose, “an elaborate sense-making or troublemaking” (Perry, 2019: 41, quoted in Benjamin, 2024: x).
Taking a political approach to professionalism by actively troubling its dominant constructions, MacKay centered educators’ lived experiences (Collins, 2000, 2008, 2022), facilitating conversations across the province even in the face of strong resistance. For example, when protest imagery was used in advocacy materials, critics asked: “Are you teaching ECEs to advocate against their centers?” This backlash against collective action—framing activism as inherently unprofessional and radical—reflects what Ahmed (2014: 66) identifies as the “politics of fear.” Ahmed (2014: 69) explains that “in fear, the world presses against the body” in the hope that the body shrinks back from fear. Reimagining professionalism meant improvising, standing up to censure and fear, disrupting disciplinary mechanisms, and putting theory to work in the radical praxis of caring activism.
Communities of practice: care as activism
Wanting to build an ECE-led advocacy movement for change, MacKay partnered with Olivia Chow's Institute for Change Leaders to (re)theorize and reimagine professionalism as something that emerged from and with ECEs. Positioning ECEs as leaders capable of bringing about the change they envisioned, educators participated in a series of training sessions that resulted in the formation of the Communities of Practice (recently renamed CARE Collectives), which embodied alternative professional values. These spaces prioritized educators’ embodied needs through caring acts like sharing food, providing an avenue to reflect and share lived experiences, and recognizing the exhaustion of care work. Communities of Practice rejected hierarchical models in favor of peer-led interdependence, creating room for anger and frustration as legitimate professional responses (Ahmed, 2014; Lorde, 1997).
One educator's story became emblematic, where she sought a partner with health benefits because her ECE position provided none. This narrative of embodied precarity (Berlant, 2011) fueled collective action, challenging individualism in professionalism. As MacKay noted in the interview: “We had to put decent work front and center. Professionalism had become a distraction.” This reorientation toward care and interdependence (Tronto, 2013) represents a radical departure from credential-focused professionalism.
Delving into the affective and sensuous dimensions of care further illuminates how professionalism is not only constructed through policy or discourse, but also felt and embodied in everyday practice. Following Ahmed's (2014) notion that emotions “stick” to bodies and shape collective orientations, these communities made care an affective force that organizes how educators relate to themselves, one another, and their work. The aesthetics of care—for example, the gestures, tones, and sensory textures of professional life—becomes a site where professionalism is reimagined. When educators share food, sit in a circle, or begin with a moment of reflection, these are not sentimental acts but affective pedagogies that cultivate belonging, mutual recognition, and ethical responsiveness. Through such embodied practices, professionalism is reconfigured as a collective, relational, and ethical project rather than a compliance-based pursuit. This affective reorientation carries transformative potential for the global early childhood field, inviting a shift away from neoliberal metrics toward a politics of feeling, care, and solidarity that reconnects educators’ professional identities to the emotional and sensorial realities of their everyday work.
Legacy: a new professionalism
Today's CARE Collectives exemplify a transformed professionalism where advocacy is not just permitted but essential. By centering marginalized voices (Collins, 2000, 2008, 2022) and embracing emotions, the CARE Collectives demonstrate how professional spaces might operate differently. As MacKay reflects: “Now, you can't talk about childcare accessibility without talking about decent work for ECEs.” This shift reveals professionalism's potential as a practice of liberation rather than control. MacKay's story offers more than critique—it models how care and activism can redefine professionalism in early childhood education and care. In a field where racialized and immigrant women face exploitation masked as professional duty, her narrative demonstrates the transformative power that emerges when affect and a feminist ethics of care come together to imagine transformational change.
Reimagining organizational goals and deliverables in supporting CARE Collectives: Erin’s and Amber's narratives
The inefficiency of professionalism
At the time of writing this article, Erin Filby, community organizer, and Amber Straker, project coordinator, worked for the AECEO supporting the CARE Collectives under the care-full leadership of executive director Alana Powell, whose strong roots in advocacy and a feminist ethics of care are infused in the organization (Langford et al., 2017; Tronto, 2013). Since September 2025, Amber has transitioned into the role of executive director, as Alana Powell has taken a position as a senior policy advisor within the federal government.
As the CARE Collectives are funded through multiple grants, Erin and Amber are routinely confronted by patriarchal and neoliberal imaginations of professionalism that require them to demonstrate accountability for the CARE Collectives. As the project coordinator, Amber needed to report back to the project funders on the efficacy of the CARE Collectives. The project funders expect measures of success that show an increase in membership and activity that aligns with the neoliberal logics of progress and outcomes. This was, however, not the reality of the CARE Collectives, whose memberships ebbed and flowed with the capacity and precarity of their members. The expectation to quantify the legitimacy of the CARE Collectives contradicted their emerging and reimagined collaborative, ethical, and caring ideology (Benjamin, 2024; Tronto, 2013). Struck by the inefficiency of professionalism that centered care, Amber actively pushed back against the funders’ expectations to meet their narrow conceptualizations of success. She held firm to her position, informed by her knowledge and lived experience of an ethics of care, “to create a community where people feel like they can trust each other and be in conversation and rely on one another and support one another. That was the most important thing, not the numbers.” In the impasse of the funders’ expectations and the inefficiency of professionalism, Amber improvised an evaluation of success understood in the shared affective experience of trust and the deepening of relationships.
Erin's role in the AECEO was originally to train ECEs to be advocates through traditional organizing strategies and tactics that do not actively take care into account either theoretically or in practice. After having been deeply influenced and affected by a feminist ethics of care, Erin now centers care and community-building as an essential foundation in empowering ECEs as caring activists (Menon et al., 2024; Richardson et al., 2023). She reflects on the transformation that care has had on her teaching: “I was thinking about the difference in the way that I teach and how deeply impacted it's been by ECEs. Like deeply impacted by ECEs. I speak about care really explicitly.” As Erin states: “We care out loud!”
Erin’s and Amber's narratives call out traditional, uncaring, and normalizing conceptualizations of who a professional ECE is. Amber states: “ethics of care and professionalism are like oil and water, they push each other away.” By centering care, both Erin and Amber embrace the inefficiency of professionalism. Within the CARE Collectives, a caring professionalism is improvised in the slowing down and valuing of everyday human experiences nurtured through care and community. What Erin and Amber have learned as a team supporting the CARE Collectives is that when they work collectively to resist neoliberal definitions of professionalism and make space for imagination and improvisation, professionalism within the CARE Collectives becomes “a poetic of immanent world-making” (Berlant, 2011: 8).
Reimagining professionalism with students: Tammy and Camila's narrative
Weeding out cruel professionalism in the classroom
Tammy McNabb and Camila Casas's student CARE Collective emerged from their lived experiences and realizations of how their post-secondary training enforced an internalization of hidden messages of professionalism to uphold and maintain the systems of oppression. In their written interview responses they share that, as students, they “felt the need to start pushing against this external expectation of the ‘good ECE.’” Tammy and Camila themselves embodied the diversity they saw in the profession and in their classrooms, however, the stories, knowledges, and lived experiences of diverse students were invisible. Tammy and Camila share collectively in text: It was evident at our first SECEO [Students Early Childhood Educators of Ontario] meeting that Ontario students were searching for individuals of a like mind to share their lived experiences. Soon after we introduced ourselves and provided a summary of the AECEO we had a student disclose the trials and tribulations of working with existing ECEs during their student placement. As a neurodivergent, non-binary student, they grappled with rising to the challenge of being the “good ECE” and speaking up about the accommodations they required to find success. Immediately following their disclosure, a second student insisted that she understood because her experience, “different yet the same,” included her feeling the pressure of exceeding expectations in her role as an ECE in training, yet couldn’t help but feel that her heavy accent was an obstacle that existing ECEs were repeatedly highlighting.
Reclaiming complaint as professional
Tammy and Camila share: one of the professional tropes we deconstruct in our community is that ECEs are so happy working with children that there is no space for complaints, but we have noticed that this lack of complaining perpetuates precarity; precarious working conditions and, in the case of international students, precarious legal status.
Reimagining professionalism through an Indigenous world view: Sherry's narrative
Professionalism in early childhood education and care is frequently defined by Eurocentric and colonial standards that emphasize individualism, bureaucratic accountability, and rigid hierarchies. In contrast, this section draws on an interview with Sherry Lickers, the co-leader of a CARE Collective for First Nations ECEs in Ontario, whose reflections offer a transformative perspective that reimagines professionalism through an Indigenous world view. As she reflects: “Professionalism because of the way our culture is, it's all matriarchal, right? The women are in charge … they make all the decisions.” Her narrative challenges dominant frameworks by centering community (Collins, 2000, 2008, 2022), care (Langford et al., 2017; Tronto, 2013), cultural identity, and relational accountability (Wilson, 2008). For Sherry and her CARE Collective, professionalism is not defined by adherence to external regulations but by the maintenance of balance, the nurturing of relationships, and the affirmation of matriarchal leadership (Tronto, 2013). Sherry's insights articulate an improvisation of professionalism grounded in Indigenous knowledge systems—one that resists colonial impositions and emphasizes the emotional connections (Ahmed, 2014) and shared cultural practices that sustain professional communities.
The foundation of Sherry’s CARE Collective: community and relationality
The formation of Sherry's CARE Collective responds to the specific challenges faced by Indigenous ECEs, who are often overlooked by mainstream professional networks. Rooted in a feminist ethics of care, the collective frames professionalism as emerging through authentic relationships (Tronto, 2013). “We developed a group for all of the First Nations supervisors to meet on a regular basis,” Sherry recounts, emphasizing how the collective filled a critical gap left by institutional structures. Its design reflects both Indigenous values and feminist care ethics, prioritizing community-building and shared leadership. Sherry underscores this by noting that she and co-lead Ruth-Ann Syrette, “We always wanted it to be their meeting and not Ruthann and I. We always wanted input from them.” These decentralized, emotional, and embodied experiences (Ahmed, 2014) foreground the political and social nature of professionalism, making it personal and centering kinship, a concept that, in Indigenous thought, signifies interdependence and responsibility among all beings (Simpson, 2017; Wilson, 2008) as central to ethical practice (Ahmed, 2014; Berlant, 2011).
A vital presence in the Collective is Elder Brenda, who opens each gathering with prayer and teachings. Sherry reflects on the Elder's impact: “She seems to be able to set the tone … she's able to just relate so much to early childhood educators.” In this context, care, affect, and emotion are not regarded as liabilities but as essential components of professionalism (Ahmed, 2014; Langford et al., 2017; Tronto, 2013). Elder Brenda's role exemplifies how cultural knowledge, values, and affective labor—the emotional work involved in maintaining community—are integral to this reimagined professionalism (Ahmed, 2014). By grounding these relationships in what Wilson (2008) terms “relational accountability,” the Collective enacts a professionalism that is reciprocal, respectful, and rooted in community responsibility rather than institutional compliance.
Challenging colonial framings of professionalism
Sherry's narrative explicitly rejects the Eurocentric notion that professionalism necessitates emotional distance or individual autonomy (Collins, 2000, 2008, 2022). In attending to the everyday doing and beings of ordinary people, she speaks candidly about the complex relational dynamics within small Indigenous ECE settings: “The biggest thing they [the educators in the Collective] have … is the fact that wherever they work, it's a very small center. And you're working with your family.” This interweaving of personal and professional life reflects Indigenous understandings of relationality, which emphasize that all relationships—human and more-than-human—carry ethical and professional responsibilities (Wilson, 2008). Such realities directly contradict western ideals of professionalism that demand detachment and compartmentalization. In advising members of the Collective, Sherry offers guidance grounded in Indigenous values: “You just have to be professional … she's your mother, but right now she's your coworker.” The Collective provides a safe and non-judgmental space to navigate these dynamics, honoring the often-invisible emotional and relational labor that sustains Indigenous ECEs in their daily practice (Osgood, 2006, 2012).
The medicine wheel as a professional framework
Central to the Collective's approach to professionalism is the incorporation of the medicine wheel, a holistic framework used by many Indigenous nations, including Anishinaabe, Cree, and Lakota communities, to represent the interconnection of the physical, emotional, mental, and spiritual dimensions of life (Hart, 2010; Lavallée, 2007). Sherry describes its significance: “That really represents your professionalism and how you fall in there … to be professional, you need to be balanced.” This model emphasizes cultural specificity and centers Indigenous world views in reimagining professional life. Sherry elaborates: “When you come in on the east door … that's how you can regulate yourself every day by following that medicine wheel.” Here, professionalism is about caring for oneself, for children, and for the community in a balanced and culturally grounded way—an ethos that the CARE Collective embodies and models (Langford et al., 2017; Tronto, 2013).
Indigenous leadership and acts of resistance
The Collective also serves as a site of resistance to colonial and oppressive systems (Collins, 2000, 2008, 2022). Sherry speaks to the hopes underpinning this work: “We're hoping that they [the educators in the Collective] would find a partner … somebody they want to do things together with.” This vision of collective leadership and mutual support is central to the group's commitment to imagining a different, more relational and just framing of professionalism (Benjamin, 2024). Sherry's narrative offers a powerful road map for transforming dominant understandings of professionalism. “It can be anybody's culture. It doesn’t have to be Indigenous,” she asserts, extending an invitation to all educators to reconsider what professionalism could look like. Her Collective's work affirms that alternative models are possible—models rooted in balance, community, and resistance to colonial norms. As Sherry reflects, this is about “getting back to those ways more so now, like from decolonizing”—a compelling reminder that redefining professionalism is part of the broader project of truth and reconciliation. Yet, as many Indigenous scholars have noted, reconciliation remains a contested term. Jewell and Mosby (2023) argue that more than a decade after the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada's Calls to Action, over 80 remain unfulfilled, revealing reconciliation as an ongoing and deeply political struggle rather than a completed process. Her narrative and the Collective's journey offer a profound example of what becomes possible when professionalism is reimagined through the lens of cultural truth and collective care. In doing so, it embodies what Benjamin (2024: 26) describes as a “collective vision for transforming the world.”
Reimagining professionalism through the Community of Black ECEs: Nicole's narrative
Embodying alternative imaginaries of professionalism
For Nicole Cummings-Morgan, one of the co-leads of the Community of Black ECEs CARE Collective, imagining professionalism that embodies the lived experiences and knowledges of Black ECEs means engaging in a “field of struggle” (Benjamin, 2024: 8) that refuses the politics of niceness embedded in a professionalism steeped in hegemonic whiteness. Nicole's narrative, woven throughout this section, demonstrates the frustration and friction of deciding the terms of professionalism for herself (Ahmed, 2014). After attending an AECEO presentation on advocacy, Nicole remembers approaching Alana Powell (then executive director of the AECEO) and saying: “You know what, Alana, thank you so much for coming in but I can't see how any of this is going to help me when I can't even see where I am in your organization.” Alana, who was also working to reimagine and embody professionalism and advocacy in terms of a feminist ethics of care, met Nicole in the struggle and responded with care and humility. Nicole recalls Alana's candid response: “Honestly, Nicole, you're right. You aren't there. But if we don't have people like you join, then we're never going to be able to get people like you on the board.” Impressed that Alana did not try to rationalize or make excuses for why there were no Black women on the AECEO's board of directors, Nicole, in fact, decided to join the board. It was Nicole's involvement and presence on the board that began to spark conversations about putting together some kind of committee for Black ECEs.
“We need something for us!”: Caring for each other in the impasse
The Community of Black ECEs was imagined and improvised with intense desire and hope, alongside anger, frustration, and grief (Ahmed, 2014; Benjamin, 2024). Shortly before the COVID-19 pandemic and the first lockdown, Nicole remembers connecting with a group of Black ECEs at a conference. She recalls offering to drive everyone home and recounts the lively conversation that ensued in her car: “We're all riled up and we're, like, we need something for us. We need something for us!” Then came the news of the pandemic and the first lockdown, then the murder of George Floyd. Nicole knew that now was the time to get something started for Black ECEs, but it had to be on their terms (Ahmed, 2014). She shares that she hollered at those women and said to them, “Look, the AECEO wants to start a committee, but I don't want to start a committee that's going to start and finish. I want some longevity. I want something that's going to be meaningful.”
“Coming as is”
Imagining an alternative ordinary of professionalism means actively resisting the white colonial imagination of professionalism (Benjamin, 2024; Berlant, 2011). Nicole describes this as follows: You know, coming as is. So, one of the things with Black ECEs, we have to deal with the issue of hair. You want to have your hair straight … it looks more professional. So, we've been saying enough is enough. “I'm coming to work with my Afro.”
Concluding thoughts
The narratives shared in this article illuminate the radical potential of improvising and reimagining professionalism in early childhood education and care as a relational, affective, and collective practice, rather than a static designation. By centering the lived experiences of educators like Lyndsay MacKay and the CARE Collective leads, we surface the political and emotional textures of professionalism that dominant frameworks—rooted in neoliberal, colonial, and patriarchal logics—often obscure. These stories push us to shift our focus from credentialism, compliance, and respectability toward care, community, and resistance, foregrounding professionalism not as an individual achievement, but as an ongoing, co-constructed practice grounded in ethical relation and collective struggle.
MacKay's leadership within the AECEO and the emergence of the CARE Collectives reveals professionalism as an evolving praxis rooted in embodied activism, a feminist ethics of care, and grass-roots knowledge-making. Her refusal to replicate capitalist, neoliberal metrics of legitimacy and instead ask ECEs what they need signals a profound epistemic shift—one that positions educators as knowledge producers and agents of change. Aligned with Black feminist thought and a feminist ethics of care, she reimagines professionalism not as a badge of respectability but as a site of ethical relation and collective care.
Erin Filby and Amber Straker, who support the CARE Collectives through their work at the AECEO, challenge neoliberal and patriarchal ideas of professionalism by centering care and relationships over metrics and deliverables. Amber emphasizes community and trust as the true project goals, pushing back against expectations of growth and outcomes. Erin integrates a feminist ethics of care into her organizing of training and facilitation, prioritizing empathy, vulnerability, and rapport. Together, they reimagine professionalism as a collaborative, care-centered practice valuing emotional honesty and collective flourishing.
Tammy McNabb and Camila Casas reveal how professionalism is often used to silence and erase student voices. Their CARE Collective creates spaces for students—particularly international students facing precarity—to share stories and resist dominant narratives of the “good ECE.” Their work reclaims “complaint” as care and survival. Through improvisation and solidarity, they model a student-led vision of professionalism grounded in caring activism.
Sherry Lickers brings a powerful Indigenous reimagining of professionalism that resists colonial hierarchies and recenters matriarchal knowledge and balance. Grounded in the teachings of the medicine wheel, her work embraces emotional, spiritual, mental, and physical well-being as interconnected. Offering a decolonial counternarrative, Sherry's conceptualization of professionalism means showing up with humility, care, and responsibility to all our relations—both human and more-than-human.
Nicole Cummings-Morgan reimagines professionalism by affirming Black identity, care, and cultural integrity. Through the creation of the Community of Black ECEs, she makes visible the violences embedded in whitewashed visions of professionalism. Nicole centers refusal, joy, and improvisation, defining professionalism on her own terms. Her leadership disrupts the logics of respectability and compliance, demonstrating that care, when practiced collectively and with intention, is resistance.
Together, these narratives offer powerful counter-stories to dominant constructions of professionalism. They reveal that professionalism need not be a site of surveillance and standardization; it can be a space of solidarity, affirmation, and possibility. Rather than accepting the “cruel optimism” (Berlant, 2011) of professionalization, these educators reclaim professionalism as a practice of care, resistance, and transformation. By foregrounding collective action, emotional labor, and cultural knowledge, the CARE Collectives show us that professionalism can be improvised and reimagined as a space where educators not only survive but also flourish.
Reimagining professionalism, then, is not merely an academic exercise. It is a political and pedagogical imperative (Benjamin, 2024). It calls on us to disrupt dominant hierarchies, center excluded voices, and move beyond critique and into collective action. As the stories in this article demonstrate, professionalism can become a powerful site of transformation if we are willing to tell different stories about what it means, whom it serves, and what it could become. This reimagining invites us to move beyond critique and into community, activism, and action, where professionalism transforms from cruelty to a collective act of becoming otherwise.
Across these narratives, professionalism is not disembodied or apolitical. It is vulnerable, relational, affective, and imaginative. These educators expose the violence of normative professional frameworks and invite us to improvise something else—a profession that does not ask us to trade care for compliance or joy for legitimacy. The CARE Collectives and their allies reclaim professionalism as a site of connection, resistance, and possibility.
Footnotes
Funding
The authors received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Declaration of conflicting interests
The authors declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.