Ecological perspective on teacher agency in segregated urban early childhood education and care

In this study, we examined how early childhood education and care (ECEC) teachers working in segregated urban areas discuss the sociospatial aspects of their work and agency. Our research questions are as follows: (a) How do ECEC teachers in urban areas talk about sociospatial features in their work with children and their families? and (b) how do these sociospatial features relate to the contextual conditions framing the professional agency achievement of teachers as expressed in their interview speech? Our research was based on semi-structured interviews with formally qualified ECEC teachers ( N = 24) working in seven Finnish cities with populations exceeding 100,000. This study is based on the ecological approach to teacher agency, exploring how the varying social, cultural and material aspects of specific ECEC workplace contexts shape teachers’ agency achievement in their everyday work. Our results suggest that sociospatial segregation manifests in teachers’ work discourses through two primary relationally constructed categories: relatively homogeneous and relatively diverse compositions of ECEC. These categories refer to the described scope and relevance of cultural-linguistic and socioeconomic heterogeneity among the children and families with whom the teachers work. In the interviews, these relational aspects of work were often spatially framed by discursively connecting them to the cities’ residential segregation. These sociospatial features intertwined with how teachers discussed the contextual conditions framing their range of options for professional action, thus shaping their agency achievement in urban ECEC.