The detrimental impacts of the professionalization of the early childhood education and care (ECEC) sector in Ontario on early childhood educators (ECEs), including myself, sparked a deep desire and need in me to embark on a research journey that has sustained me over the past six years. Increased workloads, monitoring, inspections and consequences were leading to increased stress, depression, and burnout, which in turn affected retention rates in the ECEC sector. The research question, in my masters thesis, centered on ECEs’ perspectives on and experiences of paid planning time as an important provision for their working conditions. Further, the introduction of How Does Learning Happen: Ontario’s Pedagogy for the Early Years (HDLH) (Ontario Ministry of Education, 2014), set forth a vision of ECEs as critically reflective, and engaged in collaborative inquiry and pedagogical documentation, and one that necessitates a paradigm shift away from current economy focused goals. Despite this mandate, there was no policy structure in place to ensure that ECEs had the time needed to meet these expectations, let alone the workloads requirements that were steadily increasing due to professionalization.

My focus group data, collected from 9 participants, from a variety of non-profit, for-profit and school-based settings, surprisingly revealed that despite a lack of policy, all but two of the participants reported having varying amounts and configurations of paid planning time. Most interesting was the finding that even though the nature of the participants’ workplaces and experiences of, and perspectives on planning time were highly varied, there was a significant amount of resonance among their stories of the impacts of professionalization. Those who had the least amount of planning time reported similar stories of stress, frustration, and burnout in contrast to two participants who had the most, and most consistent planning time, who reported fewer and less intense impacts. I analyzed these findings in two ways. I first compiled the information of the various configurations of planning time and determined that there is an amount and configuration that could alleviate some of the burnout and stress of the expectations of professionalization. Ultimately ECEs want and require:

• ample time (1/2 to 1 full hour a day) to be able to meet the increasing demands of the work.

• time to plan and document their curriculum together.

• flexibility, especially in the summer months when schedules shift and there are more field trips and time spent outside of the centre.

• a reduction in workload requirements.

• time to discuss their curriculum, its implications and possibilities.

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These findings were important to provide more detail for current policy recommendations (Powell & Ferns, 2023). I have published this study as a book chapter (Johnston, 2021) and am planning a policy brief this year which will provide more detail on policy recommendations (Johnston, forthcoming). Another critical aspect of this research involved situating the ECEs’ perspectives on and experiences of planning time within a critical analysis of the material-discursive landscape of neoliberalism and developmentalism in ECEC. A feminist post-structural analysis of planning time exposed a techno-economic-masculinist rationality of the professionalization of ECEC and how it contributes to and maintains the oppression of a feminized and racialized workforce. I characterized planning time in this study as “dangerous”, citing that a lack of it contributed to burnout and retention issues among ECEs. I further speculated that if ECEs had time to think deeply about their work and its implications, they may become “dangerous”, through being empowered to speak up and demand systemic change. This is where my current research continues.