‘Outside the Tent’: Early Childhood Teachers’ Summoning Authoritative Discourses in Social Networks
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Authors
Westbrook, Fiona
Hunkin, Elise
White, E Jayne
Supervisor
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Journal Article
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SAGE Publications
Abstract
Early childhood education (ECE) teachers increasingly use social networks to advocate for their professional recognition through their political dialogues within these platforms. Yet, their strategies for gaining and being appreciated as legitimised professional signals a paradox. In deploying what Bakhtin terms authoritative discourse, language that demands acceptance as a dominant, hierarchical, profaned truth, teachers simultaneously constrain the dialogues of diverse professional voices. This paper employs a Bakhtinian dialogic methodology to examine ECE teachers’ social networking exchanges during the COVID-19 pandemic in Victoria, Australia (2020), with particular attention to how temporal and spatial contexts shape language strategies. The findings indicate that while teachers summoned authoritative discourse to advocate for their professionalism, this same discourse (un)intentionally silenced divergent perspectives, excluding certain ideas, invoking organisational impunity, and creating ‘us-them’ boundaries that limited professional agency. These insights signal how authoritative discourse operates as a double-edged sword in teachers’ political advocacy, simultaneously extending recognition while atrophying diverse exchanges necessary for robust professional and political dialogues.Description
Keywords
3901 Curriculum and Pedagogy, 3903 Education Systems, 39 Education, 4 Quality Education, 1303 Specialist Studies in Education, 1605 Policy and Administration, 1606 Political Science, 3902 Education policy, sociology and philosophy, professionalism, political dialogue, authoritative discourse, social networks, early childhood teachers, Mikhail Bakhtin, dialogism, teacher voice
Source
Policy Futures in Education, ISSN: 1478-2103 (Print); 1478-2103 (Online), SAGE Publications. doi: 10.1177/14782103251412014
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© The Author(s) 2026. This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/) which permits any use, reproduction and distribution of the work without further permission provided the original work is attributed as specified on the SAGE and Open Access page (https://us.sagepub.com/en-us/nam/open-access-at-sage).