Dealing with uncertainty: challenges and possibilities for the early childhood profession

In many countries, strategies to further develop services and institutions for the education and care of young children are linked to a discourse on professionalism. Ambitious policy goals, it is argued, can only be achieved by a skilled and qualified workforce whose practice is guided by a professional body of knowledge. This article argues that the prevailing conceptualisation of the early childhood professional is constructed out of a particular, hierarchical mode of producing and applying expert knowledge that is not necessarily appropriate to professional practice in the field of early childhood education. However, it is highly effective and contributes to forming a professional habitus that contradicts the relational core of early childhood practice. Drawing on the conceptual framework of hermeneutics, the article explores an alternative paradigm of a relational, systemic professionalism that embraces openness and uncertainty, and encourages co‐construction of professional knowledges and practices. Research, in this frame of thinking, is understood as a dialogic activity of asking critical questions and creating understandings across differences, rather than producing evidence to direct practice.

Developmental Antecedents of Proactive and Reactive Rebelliousness: The Role of Parenting Style, Childhood Adversity, and Attachment

Adolescence is a time of developmental transition that for one in five young people is characterised by feelings of oppositionality, rebellion, and negativism. Despite the prevalent experience of teen turbulence and despite its significance within the phenomenological framework provided by reversal theory (RT), the childhood antecedents of rebelliousness in adolescence and adulthood have not been given extensive empirical attention within RT, although such work has been carried out using other constructs and theories. We examined recalled parenting style, childhood adversity, and attachment style in adulthood as correlates of proactive and reactive rebelliousness in a sample of 80 participants, aged 18 to 50 years. Each participant responded to a questionnaire package containing the revised Adult Attachment Scale, the Parental Bonding Instrument, the Childhood Experience of Care and Abuse Questionnaire, and the Negativism Dominance Scale. We found that paternal abusive parenting, followed by paternal parenting style, paternal neglect, and paternal antipathy were independently predictive of scores on proactive rebelliousness, the sensation-seeking form. Maternal and paternal indifferent parenting styles each were found to equivalently and independently predict scores on reactive rebelliousness, the interpersonal disaffection form. The results of this study suggest these two forms of rebelliousness may have distinctly different antecedents. A longitudinal study is needed to examine the potentially causal pathways that are suggested by the results of this cross-sectional research. We consider reversal theory explanations of these results and contrast them with complementary theoretical frameworks.