THEORETICAL FRAMEWORK. Autonomy is a core trait of professionalism -including  its continental European development (Svensson & Evetts,2003)- referring to the capacity of an occupational group to control its own work, free from the interference of any external actor -be it the State, employers, or what the literature refers to as clients (Cribb & Gewirtz, 2015; Svensson & Evetts, 2003).

Several authors have distanced from the tacit theoretical assumption that teacher professional autonomy is inherently positive while state control is inherently negative (Cribb & Gewirtz, 2007). In this vein, Wermke and colleagues (Wermke & Salokangas, 2021; Wermke et al., 2018) have posited that teacher professional autonomy has to be understood as a contextual phenomenon, embedded in local and national institutional contexts, in international educational trends, and shaped by the meanings teachers themselves ascribe to it. These authors have differentiated among three levels of control: classroom, school, and profession. 

Scarce research has addressed ECE teachers' professional autonomy. Most works have showed that ECE teachers’ practice has been constrained by national policies in the last decades (Bamsey & Fogarty, 2025; Oosterhoff et al., 2020). Also seeking to apply a non-anthropocentric way of thinking about agency (Clarke et al., 2017), Oosterhoff (2020) has argued for an understanding of the situated nature of ECE teachers' professional autonomy, contending that it should not be viewed as purely human (i.e. individuals or groups whose agencies are intended), but rather as part of situational assemblages that also include non-human (i.e. material-semiotic actors like technologies, discourses, or institutions, whose agency is not intended) (Taggart, 2011; Fairchild, 2023). Other authors have also addressed ECE teachers' professional autonomy as situated through the "more-than-human" relational lens, analyzing it as entangled assemblages within situated experiences (Arndt, 2015; Fairchild, 2018; Oosterhoff et al., 2021).

No research has addressed the relationship between professional autonomy and the construction of professionalism in the ECE field, considering the specificity of ECE teachers' professional identity (Arndt et al., 2021), or the particular national ECE institutional architectures (Kagan et al., 2016).

RESEARCH QUESTION. Chile is a country with intrinsic interest to inquire into ECE teachers' professional autonomy. Here, ECE teachers have bachelors' degree, and work in a highly fragmented provision, with curricular prescriptiveness, and high stakes accountability mechanisms (Adlerstein & Pardo, 2020). It is plausible to expect different expressions and understandings of professional autonomy and professionalism among ECE teachers' situated experience. Hence, this paper addressed the following research aim: to identify and interrelate the elements that shape professional autonomy in the situated experience of ECE teachers in Chile, mapping situationally how it is part of the construction of professionalism in the field.

METHODOLOGY. It is described in the Methods section of this proposal.

FINDINGS. The maps show ECE teachers' professional autonomy as a complex more-than-human assemblage, including human and non-human elements. Specifically, most elements that ECE teachers relate with their professional autonomy are located at the classroom level of control -which they highly value-, while the school level is significantly less prominent, the profession level appears rarely. Furthermore, the situational mapping showed a wide array of human elements (e.g. ECE teachers' pedagogical knowledge and professional experience, the qualities of ECE settings' leaders, and children as right holders (human), and non-human elements (e.g. the kind of engagement of families, and the national curriculum), which were interlinked through more-than-human assemblages (e.g. managerial performativity, territorial professional networks). The maps also show that ECE teachers understand those elements as both enablers as well as hindrances of their professional autonomy, depending on the particularities of the situation; the only exception was the national curriculum, which was unanimously understood as an enabler of ECE teachers' professional autonomy.

SITUATIONAL ANALYSIS APPROACH This research relied on Situational Analysis, which is an extension of the Grounded Theory that integrates poststructural notions. It emphasizes analyzing behaviors, discourses and relations of power, grounding the analysis in the situation. It takes human (e.g. ECE teachers) and nonhuman elements (e.g. technologies) into analytic account, where the situation itself becomes the unit of analysis (Clarke, 2021). PARTICIPANTS Participants were 104 ECE teachers working as principals or classroom teachers in various types of ECE settings from 9 Chilean cities (Clarke et al., 2016). All of them signed informed consent. DATA PRODUCTION We produced data by drawing on 17 focus groups (Barbour, 2018; Clarke et al., 2016), with 5-9 participants each one. We elicited participants' discourses on professional autonomy by inviting them to reflect on situations drawn from their own everyday experience, and represent it on a participant-produced diagram (Banks, 2018; Clarke et al., 2016). The production of these diagrams served to elicit dialogue around professional autonomy. DATA ANALYSIS Situational Analysis develops through the construction of three consecutive types of maps: Situational Map; Social Worlds/Arenas Map, and Positional Map. This article focuses on the construction of Situational Maps. We constructed Situational Maps through Messy and Relational maps. Messy Maps displayed an unstructured visualization of the major elements in a situation, as framed by participants. Relational maps depicted salient relations among elements from messy maps, indicating their mutual connections. Finally, we constructed Situational Maps by organizing elements into analytic categories (e.g., actors, discourses) for pattern identification, laying out the major human, nonhuman, discursive, political, and other elements (Clarke, 2016), highlighting power relationships, and nonhuman entanglements. As Situational Analysis is an extension of the Grounded Theory, throughout the mapping process, we used the constant comparative method to define categories and relationships, and memo writing accompanied mapping to document analytic decisions and emerging insights. We revised the maps iteratively as new data were incorporated (Clarke et al., 2016).

This research contributes to debates on ECE teachers’ professional autonomy by examining it through situational analysis. The maps show a strong concentration of elements related with professional autonomy at the classroom level, indicating a displacement from traditional understandings of autonomy as a form of collective professional jurisdiction (Svensson & Evetts, 2003), and, thus, a potential weakness of ECE teachers' professional autonomy. From a Clarkean perspective, the limited presence of school, and profession levels of autonomy (Cribb & Gewirtz, 2007, 2015) can be interpreted -from a Clarkean perspective- as analytically significant silences, indicating that collective professional control is not a salient dimension of professionalism among ECE teachers in Chile. Large degrees of professional autonomy at the classroom appears as individualised and situational practice enacted in situ. Extending Wermke and colleagues’ multi-level framework, the analysis shows how classroom-level autonomy becomes dominant within the situation of ECE teachers in Chile -as a highly valued trait-, while collective levels (school and profession) remain marginalised. As ECE teachers in Chile highly value their professional autonomy at the classroom level, this pattern differs from the autonomy paradox observed across Europe (i.e. Finland, Ireland, Germany, and Sweden), where teachers perceive heightened individual autonomy as burdensome, fostering self-imposed limits rather than professional freedom. Furthermore, the fact that the elements in the maps are tightly interlinked suggests that ECE teachers understand professional autonomy as primarily mediated through more-than-human assemblages. Finally, the fact that the maps show that practically all elements bear an ambivalent (i.e. positive and negative) relation with their professional autonomy, according to the specific situation, suggests that autonomy emerges not as a stable trait of professionalism, but as a contingent accomplishment produced through specific assemblages that shape teachers’ everyday professional decision-making.

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