Professionality and gender: men's participation and early childhood

Abstract

The approach of the relationship between professionalism and gender at work with early childhood, proposed in this paper, requires a brief contextualization. Jan Peeters is director of the Centre for Innovation in the Early Years, a research center linked to the University of Gante in Belgium and the Social Pedagogy and Social Work course. His studies focus on the relationship between gender and early childhood, with emphasis on the coordination of five projects on the professionalization of services for early childhood, within the Framework of the European Union (EU). Early-childhood services within the EU, especially in countries and regions cited by Peeters in this article, are varied and generally intersectoral in nature, involving areas such as social assistance, education and health.Although in different countries - even regions and cities - they have their own characteristics, they can be characterized as services that arise with a perspective of custody and more recently incorporate a perspective of reception. Therefore, welcoming is a broader conception about the sharing with the families of education and care of young children, which can occur in collective institutions, small institutions that welcome few children, in some contexts up to five, in private space of the family, with the hiring of a professional accredited by the responsible body, among other forms.This variety of services, named in some passages of the text as structures for early childhood, differs significantly from the Brazilian context, and requires some attention to their understanding, including in relation to the terminologies used, as welcoming, when referring to the objective of the services and caregivers and educators, when it identifies the professionals who work in different services with the children. In relation to the central theme — the relationship between gender and professionalism — the author treats it considering the set of professionals who work in different care services of young children. The studies, policies and programs that he describes and analyses throughout the text lead him to advocate gender equity in professions of young childhood, which the author calls gender-neutral professionalism, a definition derived in particular from the experiences developed in UK at Sheffield Children's Center and the Pen Green Family Center, integrated services for small childhood, which since the 1980s employ almost as many men as women.These brief notes seek to situate aspects that characterize the important contribution of Jan Peeters to the debate on gender and professionalism at work with early childhood and introduce the reader in approach presented here, which was systematized from a conference held in 2009, transformed into a paper and published in 2013, in “Little Childhood and Participation: a Democratic Approach to Welcoming” (Petite enface et participation: une approche démocratique de l'accueil), organized by Sylvie Rayna and Catherine Bouve.