The purpose of this qualitative study is to explore t experiences of highly experienced
early childhood teachers with more than 8 years of career education and its significance. For
data collection, there were 5 sessions of in-depth interviews over 3 months with 3 teachers
who have more than 8 years of experience of working in children education institutes and
are in charge of classes in national and public kindergartens, private kindergartens, and
daycare centers. The result showed that they were not aware that they were highly
experienced due to unsuitable positions for their career, viewed themselves as shadows as
they were excluded from decision-making process and did not gain recognition, and had
desires and conflicts about promotion. In the meantime, as nominal assistant directors, they
had the difficulty of dealing with heavy workload, but were credited as skillful and highly
experienced teachers by parents, directors, and coworkers. Still, with the desire for job
security, they intended to take the national and public employment examination after
resignation. Meanwhile, though they are highly experienced, when they change jobs, they
have to go through ‘survival period’ anew, and have trouble finding jobs as institutions do
not welcome highly experienced teachers. So they were constantly concerned and anxious
about their career and some of them end up going to graduate school. From the experiences
of the 3 highly-experienced childhood teachers, the significance of ‘value as skill of long
experience’, 'alienated existence as an object', ‘alienation from relationship and existence of
instability’, and ‘deterritorialization try to a new plateau’ was deduced.