Similarly, a study conducted in the UK reported on educators' invocation of a 'professionalism from within' (Osgood 2010, 126) that allowed them to express ways of being a professional that did not rely upon the dominant discourses of professionalism otherwise available to them.
Another area of the Early Years Workforce Strategy we wish to explore through our critical reading concerns discourses of professionalism and professionalisation.
Similarly, knowledge-based discourses of professionalism may ignore the important relational aspects of early childhood practice (Dalli 2008) that are important to educators' own conceptualisations of their professionalism (Ortlipp et al. 2011).
However, as we have also endeavoured to show, the focus in Australia's Early Years Workforce Strategy on qualifications and credentials-based discourses of professionalism offer only a limited approach to supporting workforce sustainability.
Through an emphasis upon measurable, standardised aspects of early childhood practice such as credentialling (Osgood 2010) and qualifications (Urban 2008), policy initiatives can conflate professionalisation with professionalism, thereby shaping discourses of professionalism in limited ways (as Osgood 2006 reports, for example).
As Nettleton et al [ 4] previously pointed out, the discursive repertoires that people so readily draw upon reveal as much about the prevailing discourses of professionalism, biomedicine and active citizenship as they do about the views and preferences of the actors themselves.
By analysing political educational documents, we investigate how effects of lifelong learning discourses create shifts in the understanding of professionalism in the landscape of early childhood and schooling in Norway.
Mounrouxe and colleagues explored explicit discourses on professionalism among students from three medical schools through focus group discussions; the authors identified 19 dimensions of professionalism, and found that discourses varied between pre-clinical and clinical students and also between schools [ 7].
Concepts such as music as gendered discourse; professionalism; reception of women's music; examination of the sites of music production; relative wealth and education of women; popular music studies in relation to women's identity; patriarchal ideas in music analysis; and notions of gender and difference are among the themes examined during this time.
