2011, 3
The grounds for tolerance towards the disabled must be formed at the very early stages of personality development – in preschool childhood, when a child is being acquainted to the outside world and learns primary social skills.
Kindergarten plays the major role in acquiring tolerance because it is the teaching process that creates situations of cultural, interpersonal, formal and informal communication. The problem in the view is of urgent importance in small towns, where integrated education is absent. That is why the solution could be enactment of communication with the disabled that involves live-through experience and comprehension of cultural value of non-violence, empathy and mutual respect. The article describes the original program “The World is one for everyone” that was designed around the aforementioned principles, including plans and examples of classes.
The analysis of teaching practices of 30 preschool teachers through interview and observation, allowed distinguishing four teaching styles:
1. Formal. Teachers formally admit that ecological education is important for the new generation, but it remains of little or no personal value. They teach careful treatment of the environment and at the same time show no personal example. The consumerist’ approach prevails.
2. Informative. Teachers perform ecological informing rather than teaching. External motivation is apparent – children know much, therefore they are ecologically educated.
3. Enclosed ecological teaching. Teachers teach to care for the environment, take part in school yard improvement and local ecological initiatives. However, they lack in teaching skills to transfer their knowledge of and devotion to nature on to children.
4. Open ecological teaching. Teachers possess necessary teaching skills to share their passion for environment, are emotionally involved in questions of care for nature and pose as living example for their pupils on the subject of ecological education.
The author stands that lie occurs naturally beginning from 4 years of age. Lie is a negative concomitant of positive attainments in child’s development. A child faces two types of situations in life – the ones that allow natural action with accordance to social expectancies, and the others that provoke lying. Situations of personal value where norms of morale collide with personal needs become a psychological problem to a child. The resolution of such situation is a choice between whether to satisfy the need and undergo condemnation from the grownups, or to preserve good relationships with them. Sometimes a child decides to choose both to satisfy the need and to preserve good relationships. For this children perform the forbidden action and conceal this fact from a grownup to avoid condemnation.
The results allow to say that at the age of 3 to 5 years children have almost no differentiation of an accidental mistake and a deliberate deception. They are incapable of understanding where a lie is conscious, and where it isn’t, and view any error or mistake as a lie. It is in their senior preschool years that children became capable of precisely differentiating between a mistake and a deception.
The quality of preschool education concerns foremost the teaching process, the very interaction between a teacher and a child. From this position, the improvement of education’s quality is assistance to child’s teaching and development. Furthermore, there are certain conditions to changes in teaching quality, that depend on teachers’ awareness of factors affecting their own work – knowledge of the pertaining governmental policies, knowledge of children and their learning ways, self-awareness as a teacher. Can quality in preschool be enhanced through competence development simultaneously to organisational changes and financial cutbacks? The aim of this study was to develop a model of development of pedagogue competence to enhance quality in preschool. This model takes it’s point of departure in evaluations of quality, as evaluated by the Early Childhood Environment Rating Scale (ECERS), and evolved in interaction with the pedagogues throughout development work. The study is divided into three parts.
1. An external evaluation of quality of 20 preschool units using the ECERS.
2. A selection of an intervention group and a control group. The intervention group takes part in a competence development work, which starts and ends with self-evaluations of quality as evaluated by the ECERS.
3. An external evaluation of quality using the ECERS on the same preschool units.