Pedagogical professionalism in the era of accountability

Based on traditional understandings of the professionalism of pedagogues, the drastic increase in the use of standardized commercial programs in the Danish ECE area can be looked upon as a competing demand for professionalization that threatens to curtail the educators' room for maneuvering. With Evetts (2011), a preliminary analysis of interviews with pedagogues suggests that this image of organizational professionalism displacing the original occupational professionalism is not supported. Rather, it is suggested that professionalism can be regarded as a series of pragmatic merging strategies, actively carried out by the pedagogues, between occupational values and organizational demands.