This research explores connections between the ways in which an early childhood educator (ECE) identity is discursively formed within professional training and the marginalization of the ECE workforce. The underlying premise was that pedagogical discourses of the ECE regarded as "good" contribute to the formation of a particular kind of worker who is prepared and expected to work in a stratified gendered, educational labour market. Several interrelated critical questions guided the research. The author sought to identify both historical and contemporary discursive representations of the good ECE, to explain how working conditions as well as divisions of gender, race, ethnicity and class are represented in the discourses and to examine how the discourses function ideologically. She also wanted to identify crises in the discourses from which new constructions could potentially emerge to initiate social changes in ECE identity formation, social relations and economic arrangements.