Abstract:

Amidst a trust crisis in institutional childcare, digital media technologies are increasingly deployed as a means of communication between family and educational institution, making"visibility" a key aspect of early childhood educators' work environment. Drawing on the theoretical perspective of professional autonomy, this paper examines the impact of visibility on teachers' professional practice. The study finds that, ECEC institutions adopt different modes of visibility based on their positions in the market, aiming to meet parents' demands for information access and remote care via media representation. However, such practices pose new challenges to the professional autonomy of early childhood educators. This is not only because media technologies have made the process of caregiving more visible to parents, but also, more fundamentally, because there is a mismatch between the nature of media representation and the logic of caregiving. And thus, its open-ended interpretations likely lead to conflicts between teachers and parents.Faced with the possibility that their work might be scrutinised, judged, or even interfered with, preschool teachers attempt to regain control over their work through three strategies: information control, relationship management, and conditional resistance. Meanwhile, the pursuit of visibility has led to unintended and paradoxical consequences for teachers: meeting the visibility demands, addressing the challenges it poses, and taking strategic actions to safeguard professional autonomy, have all become an integral part of their professional practice, thereby reducing the attentiveness and positive emotional engagement required for high-quality care and education.On the practical level, this study focuses and reflects on the impact of technology on teacher-child interactions and early childhood development; on the theoretical level, it proposes an analytical framework of "negotiated professional autonomy", advocating for an inquiry that is grounded in micro-level workplaces to explore how practitioners strive to gain control over professional matters through multi-agent interactions and everyday work practices, thereby expanding the scope of the sociological analysis of diverse occupations.

Key words: preschool teachers, visibility, professional autonomy, family-school interaction