Early childhood educators educated at master-level as practitioners: Bringing knowledge into play. Four different trajectories.

The general question that started our project was: What happens when early-childhood educators, who got a master degree, return to practice.
We were especially interested in the master degree educators’ experiences of the benefits of the academic education, the master degree educators’ experience of how they bring their competences into play and how the master degree educators handle and experience the attitudes of colleagues and managers in relation towards them. In other words, we are interested in how the master degree educators relate the knowledge acquired in their academic education to practical pedagogy, which shows our interest in the relation between knowledge and practice.
As we do a multiple case study, based on interviews with master degree educators, we are interested in what is common and what is different in the professional lives of the master degree educators. Our hypothesis is that there will be big differences between them but the differences represent a personalization of their professional lives. We understand their professional lives as different trajectories, which are unique but still comparable. If that is the case personalization - instead of standardization - of educational trajectories may be a relevant strategy for academic education. So, we ask: (how) can the cases of different trajectories inform our thinking about academic education at master level? And (how) can the cases of different trajectories inform our thinking about how they return to practice?
We are both interested in the academic education of master degree educators and of the practice which the master degree educators return to.