“To tell you the truth, I did not choose early childhood education”: Narratives of becoming a pre-primary teacher in Tanzania

•Tanzanian prospective pre-primary teachers navigate competing discourses of ECE.•Prospective teachers weave institutional discourse into their own narratives.•Shifting narratives demonstrated agency in a context of limited opportunity.

The current global focus on expanding access to early childhood education (ECE) is accompanied by calls to professionalize the ECE teaching force. In Tanzania, efforts to improve the quality of teaching and learning at the pre-primary level led to the development of a new pre-primary diploma training program. In this article, I examine this effort from the perspective of 12 prospective teachers. By tracing their narratives of becoming a pre-primary teacher, I demonstrate how diploma students navigated competing discourses and incorporated institutional discourses into their own narratives as a way of exercising agency in a context of constrained opportunity.