Editorial

As the excitement of the FIFA (International Federation of Association Football) Women’s World Cup comes to Australia and New Zealand, we are excited as this is the first issue that publishes eight articles per issue as a regular occurrence. This is a way of moving articles more quickly from OnlineFirst to official publication. Professionalisation, professionalism and quality have long been discussed in the international literature. So has neo-liberalism and its continuing and pervasive effects on education and society. In the first article of this issue, the professionalisation of practitioners and working conditions in Ireland are addressed by Geraldine Mooney Simmie and Dawn Murphy (‘Professionalisation of early childhood education and care practitioners: Working conditions in Ireland’). They locate the professionalisation of practitioners in the context of policy reforms and use a critical feminist inquiry to investigate the lived reality of practitioners. The policy analysis, survey and interviews exposed a market economy where increased credentialism, surveillance and performative demands by the state prevailed over a group of women with low skills and precarious employment, and their rights as workers. Conflict, natural disasters, the environment, poverty, politics and being a member of a vulnerable group are some of the reasons why people become refugees. Images of families in refugee camps and the difficult conditions there are often shown by western media outlets. Less is known about what happens after refugees are resettled in their new country. The second article theorises the pōwhiri (‘Pōwhiri: The ritual of encounter’), the traditional Māori welcome ceremony or ritual of encounter, ‘as a metaphor for refugee families and children coming to belong in Aotearoa New Zealand’. The authors, Lesley Rameka, Ruth Ham and Linda Mitchell, consider how Māori ways of knowing, doing and understanding the world can be used to develop and strengthen a sense of bicultural belonging yet support refugee families to maintain a sense of belonging with their home countries. The theory-building draws on a range of observational, conversational and documentation resources, and shares responses from refugees to this powerful ritual. Returning to the neo-liberal reform agenda and in contrast to the pōwhiri ritual of encounter, Olivera Kamenarac explains the reconstruction of teacher professional identities and professionalism in Aotearoa New Zealand (‘Business managers in children’s playground: Exploring a problematic (or not!) identity construction of early childhood teachers in New Zealand’). Marketisation and privatisation have produced changes that construct teachers as business managers and, in the process, altered the purpose of early childhood education and the ‘core professional ethical values’ of teaching and professionalism. These same values used to be grounded in collective democracy, equity and social justice. As an alternative, Kamenarac suggests an ethics of resistance that critically engages with business-oriented identities and positions them as a choice and not inevitable. The fourth article, by Helen Little and Matthew Stapleton, returns to the idea of belonging and explores belonging through the risky play of toddlers in an outdoor environment (‘Exploring toddlers’ rituals of “belonging” through risky play in the outdoor environment’). A case study explored the risky play of children under the age of three to deepen understanding of the relationship between Editorial