Conference Agenda

THEORETICAL FRAMEWORK. Autonomy is a core trait of professionalism -including its continental European development (Svensson & Evetts,2003)- referring to the capacity of an occupational group to control its own work, free from the interference of any external actor -be it the State, employers, or what the literature refers to as clients (Cribb & Gewirtz, 2015; Svensson & Evetts, 2003).

Several authors have distanced from the tacit theoretical assumption that teacher professional autonomy is inherently positive while state control is inherently negative (Cribb & Gewirtz, 2007). In this vein, Wermke and colleagues (Wermke & Salokangas, 2021; Wermke et al., 2018) have posited that teacher professional autonomy has to be understood as a contextual phenomenon, embedded in local and national institutional contexts, in international educational trends, and shaped by the meanings teachers themselves ascribe to it. These authors have differentiated among three levels of control: classroom, school, and profession.

Scarce research has addressed ECE teachers' professional autonomy. Most works have showed that ECE teachers’ practice has been constrained by national policies in the last decades (Bamsey & Fogarty, 2025; Oosterhoff et al., 2020). Also seeking to apply a non-anthropocentric way of thinking about agency (Clarke et al., 2017), Oosterhoff (2020) has argued for an understanding of the situated nature of ECE teachers' professional autonomy, contending that it should not be viewed as purely human (i.e. individuals or groups whose agencies are intended), but rather as part of situational assemblages that also include non-human (i.e. material-semiotic actors like technologies, discourses, or institutions, whose agency is not intended) (Taggart, 2011; Fairchild, 2023). Other authors have also addressed ECE teachers' professional autonomy as situated through the "more-than-human" relational lens, analyzing it as entangled assemblages within situated experiences (Arndt, 2015; Fairchild, 2018; Oosterhoff et al., 2021).

No research has addressed the relationship between professional autonomy and the construction of professionalism in the ECE field, considering the specificity of ECE teachers' professional identity (Arndt et al., 2021), or the particular national ECE institutional architectures (Kagan et al., 2016).

RESEARCH QUESTION. Chile is a country with intrinsic interest to inquire into ECE teachers' professional autonomy. Here, ECE teachers have bachelors' degree, and work in a highly fragmented provision, with curricular prescriptiveness, and high stakes accountability mechanisms (Adlerstein & Pardo, 2020). It is plausible to expect different expressions and understandings of professional autonomy and professionalism among ECE teachers' situated experience. Hence, this paper addressed the following research aim: to identify and interrelate the elements that shape professional autonomy in the situated experience of ECE teachers in Chile, mapping situationally how it is part of the construction of professionalism in the field.

METHODOLOGY. It is described in the Methods section of this proposal.

FINDINGS. The maps show ECE teachers' professional autonomy as a complex more-than-human assemblage, including human and non-human elements. Specifically, most elements that ECE teachers relate with their professional autonomy are located at the classroom level of control -which they highly value-, while the school level is significantly less prominent, the profession level appears rarely. Furthermore, the situational mapping showed a wide array of human elements (e.g. ECE teachers' pedagogical knowledge and professional experience, the qualities of ECE settings' leaders, and children as right holders (human), and non-human elements (e.g. the kind of engagement of families, and the national curriculum), which were interlinked through more-than-human assemblages (e.g. managerial performativity, territorial professional networks). The maps also show that ECE teachers understand those elements as both enablers as well as hindrances of their professional autonomy, depending on the particularities of the situation; the only exception was the national curriculum, which was unanimously understood as an enabler of ECE teachers' professional autonomy.

The incorporation of interdisciplinary education into teacher education standards involves more than the formal inclusion of a pedagogical principle: it entails a set of epistemic and cultural decisions through which specific understandings of knowledge integration and professional preparation are normatively stabilised. Interdisciplinary education is increasingly positioned as a key orientation for preparing teachers to address complex educational problems that exceed disciplinary boundaries, raising questions about how such integration becomes legitimate within formal frameworks of teacher education. This paper examines how interdisciplinary education is constructed through teacher education standards and the tensions that arise from this normative configuration.

Teacher education standards play a constitutive role in defining what counts as legitimate knowledge, professional practice, and academic organisation within initial teacher education (Cochran-Smith et al., 2018; Ingvarson et al., 2006). They function as regulatory instruments that operate through normative stabilisation, shaping expectations about what future teachers should know, be able to do, and how their preparation should be organised under regimes of standardisation and accountability (Falabella, 2014, 2021; Bellei & Muñoz, 2023). When interdisciplinary education is articulated within such standards, its meaning is shaped through expert-driven deliberations that delimit its scope, relevance, and relationship to disciplinary traditions.

This study examines the Chilean case, where standards have become a central regulatory mechanism for secondary initial teacher education following the establishment of the Teacher Professional Development System (Chile, 2016). In this context, the Ministry of Education convened academic teams from universities to elaborate pedagogical and disciplinary standards through expert-led processes approved by the National Education Council. These standards function as official reference points for programme accreditation and national diagnostic assessment, reinforcing their constitutive influence on the alignment between initial teacher education, the school curriculum, and expectations of professional performance (Voisin & Fernández, 2025).

Conceptually, the analysis draws on the notion of policy objects (Sin, 2014) to approach interdisciplinary education not as a stable pedagogical innovation imported into teacher education, but as an object that is constructed, delimited, and rendered governable through normative work. From this perspective, standards-making constitutes a site where expert deliberations establish what interdisciplinary education is taken to mean, what forms of knowledge integration are considered legitimate, and which professional expectations are attached to future secondary teachers.

While existing research has identified the institutional domain as a key yet underexplored site for understanding interdisciplinary education, there has been limited analytical specification of how this domain can be examined when the empirical focus is on standards. Process-oriented approaches to institutionalising interdisciplinarity (Vienni-Baptista, 2024) enable this examination by foregrounding epistemic and cultural dimensions through which interdisciplinary education is normatively configured within institutional settings.

This study asks how interdisciplinary education is defined and prescribed within the official regulatory field of initial teacher education, which epistemic, pedagogical, and organisational assumptions underpin this prescription, and what tensions, ambivalences, and expectations emerge regarding its incorporation into teacher education programmes. Methodologically, this study is based on qualitative document analysis of a corpus of national teacher education standards and related regulatory texts, analysed through reflexive thematic analysis focusing on definitional statements and internal normative tensions. The findings indicate that interdisciplinary education is selectively and unevenly stabilised within teacher education standards, with disciplinary hierarchies and instrumental framings structuring differentiated expectations regarding integration, collaboration, and professional responsibility. By analysing standards as sites of normative decision-making, the paper contributes to teacher education research by clarifying how interdisciplinary education is institutionally configured through academic and organisational distinctions rather than through coherent pedagogical prescriptions.

Education systems world wide deal with persisting teacher shortages (UNESCO, 2024). The related teacher turnover has detrimental effects on students learning, especially in disadvantaged populations (Atteberry et al., 2017). To retain their teachers, school leaders and policy makers should know how teachers commit to their work (Lambersky, 2016). Commitment is a volitional bond with a part of one’s work (i.e., a target) that reflects on dedication and responsibility (Klein et al., 2012). Teacher who have higher commitment have less turnover intentions (Moodie, 2025), report higher well-being (McInerney et al., 2015), and their students have higher academic achievements (Li et al., 2022). Previous research on teacher commitment has primarily focused on commitment directed at their organisation or commitment in general. However, organisations are composed of multiple constituencies with their own values and goals (Reichers, 1985). Consequently, the current study considers a range of potential commitments that teacher may have to broaden the understanding of how teachers relate to the various aspects of their complex work. This will show how commitment towards various targets can be experienced differently. According to Klein et al.'s (2022) commitment systems theory, teachers have these multiple commitments simultaneously in varying degrees which are connected to each other as a network. Commitments that lay closer to the centre of this network influence the meaning and direction of teachers’ commitment in general (Klein et al., 2022). For instance, committed teachers’ primary focus in their work are their students (Fransson & Frelin, 2016), which indicates that commitment to students has a central place in teachers’ commitment systems. By employing this network perspective, understanding of teachers’ commitment is expanded from looking at individual commitments to a more general functioning of teachers commitment as a whole. Furthermore, previous research provided valuable insights into the reason why teachers leave to profession (e.g., Amitai & Van Houtte, 2022; Pressley et al., 2026). Building on these findings, this study addresses why teachers intend to remain in the profession. These insights can equip school leaders to provide teachers with meaningful work.

To investigate how teachers commit to their work, this study asks two questions: how to teachers express their commitment to certain workplace targets and how do central commitments influence teachers’ commitment? These research questions were investigated through semi-structured interviews, which will be further addressed in the method section of this proposal.

In order to get a sense of how teachers’ experience their work-place commitments, the main components of Klein et al.'s (2012) definition of commitment (i.e., volition, responsibility, and dedication) need to be separately recognised in teachers’ accounts. Responsibility suggests that teachers care for a target (Klein et al., 2014). The role they take has characteristics that make them accountable over the target, which means that their relationship with these targets carries a degree of caution (Martin, 2007). Dedication is a sense of enthusiasm, inspiration or challenge teachers feel for a target, they feel proud to work with it (Schaufeli & Bakker, 2004). As such, commitments are intended to be long-term bonds that drive teachers to perform in favourable actions regarding the target (Meyer et al., 2004). Commitment can be differentiated from other workplace bonds (i.e., acquiescence and instrumental bonds) through the presence of volition (Klein et al., 2012). This study follows approach Zhu's (2004) to volition, meaning that it bridges between teachers’ intentions, desires, beliefs or reasons and the enactment of the commitment. In this vein, not only the presence of positive attitudes, but also internalised intentions, desires, beliefs or reasons indicate some degree of volition in the bond with a target.