(Care)fully reconstituting cruel professionalism with and for early childhood educators: how caring activism can resist uncaring conditions

As a patriarchal and neoliberal construct, professionalism actively contorts the embodied care work of this femme profession into a predetermined frame, fragmenting, constricting, and harming educators' identities. In this paper, we briefly outline the ongoing project of professionalism both in the ECEC sector broadly and in the unique context of Ontario, Canada. Taking up Lauren Berlant's concept of cruel optimism, we assert that professionalism in ECEC is cruel. We situate our example of cruel professionalism within the Ontario, Canada context and take up the Association of Early Childhood Educators Ontario's (AECEO) grassroots community-building work grounded in feminist ethics of care and the idea of caring activism to subvert this cruelty. We do this by centering the voices and lived experiences of ECEs working in a marginalized corner of the ECEC sector who are also active members of a grassroots advocacy community of practice (CoP) associated with the AECEO. Through their narratives the cruelty of professionalism is exposed, and the collective improvisation of caring activism amongst ECEs is revealed. We conclude by offering a caring optimism as a proposition and an open question for redefining and reconstituting what it means to be a professional ECE.