Present-day early childhood educators face the challenge of producing their professional identities in highly neo-liberal contexts, negotiating contested discourses on professionalism, education quality and the overall purpose of early childhood education. While it has been suggested by critical scholarship that the early childhood workforce responds to these challenges by developing a unified professional identity, the author contends that particular contexts of practice (such as schools) and the schoolification of early childhood education may produce fragmentation within the workforce. This is crystallised in the figure of the school-based early childhood educator, whose professional practice lies somewhere between that of a kindergarten educator and a schoolteacher. As school-based early childhood education is not perceived as proper early childhood practice by kindergarten educators, school-based educators struggle to identify with this group of practitioners. Drawing on a psychoanalytically informed qualitative study with early childhood educators, the author discusses some of these tensions and proposes the notion of liminal identity (an intermediate space of becoming where identities – among other possibilities – may be examined and reimagined) as a starting point for the exploration of this emergent type of professional subjectivity in the context of an increasing provision of early childhood education in school settings. The author calls for a destabilisation of oversimplified understandings of the relation between educators and their contexts of practice, and the acknowledgement that educators experience and respond to the struggles of the profession in diverse and complex ways.

当今的幼儿教育工作者面临的挑战是在高度新自由主义的背景下产生他们的专业身份，就专业性、教育质量和幼儿教育的总体目的进行有争议的讨论。虽然批判性学术研究表明，幼儿劳动力通过发展统一的专业身份来应对这些挑战，但作者认为，特定的实践环境（如学校）和幼儿教育的学校化可能会在劳动力中产生分裂. 这在以学校为基础的幼儿教育工作者的形象中得到了体现，其专业实践介于幼儿园教育工作者和学校教师之间。由于以学校为基础的幼儿教育不被视为恰当的通过幼儿园教育工作者的幼儿实践，校本教育工作者难以认同这群从业者。通过与幼儿教育工作者进行的精神分析定性研究，作者讨论了其中一些紧张关系，并提出了阈限身份的概念（一个成为的中间空间，身份——除其他可能性——可以被检查和重新想象）作为一个起点在学校环境中越来越多地提供幼儿教育的背景下，探索这种新兴的专业主体性。作者呼吁打破对教育者与其实践背景之间关系的过于简单化的理解，