‘Outside the tent’: early childhood teachers’ summoning authoritative discourses in social networks

Early childhood education (ECE) teachers increasingly use social networks to advocate for their professional recognition through their political dialogues within these platforms. Yet, their strategies for gaining and being appreciated as legitimised professional signals a paradox. In deploying what Bakhtin terms authoritative discourse, language that demands acceptance as a dominant, hierarchical, profaned truth, teachers simultaneously constrain the dialogues of diverse professional voices. This paper employs a Bakhtinian dialogic methodology to examine ECE teachers’ social networking exchanges during the COVID-19 pandemic in Victoria, Australia (2020), with particular attention to how temporal and spatial contexts shape language strategies. The findings indicate that while teachers summoned authoritative discourse to advocate for their professionalism, this same discourse (un)intentionally silenced divergent perspectives, excluding certain ideas, invoking organisational impunity, and creating ‘us-them’ boundaries that limited professional agency. These insights signal how authoritative discourse operates as a double-edged sword in teachers’ political advocacy, simultaneously extending recognition while atrophying diverse exchanges necessary for robust professional and political dialogues.