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Toward a competent system - current issues and development of university pre-service ECEC training in Croatia

Quality of the early childhood education and care system can be described by using a competent system (Urban et al., 2012). The European Commision (2020) recognized that pre-service training systems, as part of a competent system, have a challenging task of both ensuring high levels of quality and professionalism while searching for quality and its own transformation. Therefore, they should not only act as a treasury of decontextualized knowledge, but rather critically reflect on it in order to contextualize and co-construct new meanings and realities. Pre- service training systems should be platforms for pedagogical experimentation and democracy, encounter and meaningful interaction (Moss & Urban, 2011). In terms of bridging the gap (Lenz Taguchi, 2010), pre-service students need to interact with the ECEC system and children and reflect on those experiences in dialectic activity with mentors both at university and in-service levels (Pirard et al., 2018). This complex interaction allows all of the stakeholders to discover what is already known but also new possibilities and alternatives. Grounding it in a competent system theoretical framework, this paper gives an overview of a Croatian university pre-service ECEC training (BA), with emphasis on the new conditions caused by COVID-19 outbreak. It presents a case study of a university compulsory course of the Integrated ECEC curriculum whose practicum had to be carried out in a virtual environment for university ECEC mentors, while pre-service students were engaged in pedagogical work in kindergarten. Being unable to directly participate, the university ECEC mentors had to rely on on-line communication and pedagogical documentation made by pre-service students. It provided the knowledge, practices and values (Urban et al., 2012) through the reflective process of “asking critical questions and creating understandings across differences, rather than producing evidence to direct practice” (Urban, 2008, pp.135). This case study shows how unpredictable situations and contexts can bring round overly neglected aspects of pre-service ECEC training as well as denounce its current weaknesses in the context of quality and professionalization.

competent system, pre-service training, pedagogical documentation, quality

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