Making a Difference in the Lives of Young Children: A Critical Analysis of a Pedagogical Discourse for Motivating Young Women to Become Early Childhood Educators‪.‬

Findings in this article indicate that training programs use a key pedagogical and ideological discourse of "teachers make a difference" to motivate female early childhood education students to enter and stay in the field. However, research in the area of workforce retention maintains that many graduates are not willing to enter and stay in a workforce characterized as economically, socially, and politically marginalized, and part of a secondary labour market. This article, which presents an alternative pedagogical discourse to account for the realities of the work, could initiate changes in professional identity formation, social relations, and economic arrangements. Key words: training, workforce, marginalization retention