engleski

Educators in Nursery Groups: Challenges and Perspectives

In addition to the basic tasks related to caring for very young children, the curriculum for working in a nursery group also presupposes meeting a variety of needs and stimulating many types of development: emotional, social, cognitive, physical and early speech development. Educators need to continuously work on creating a quality environment by observing and listening to children and their needs. The environment’s learning conditions must be able to encourage the child towards independence, and they must be dynamic, rooted in the child’s best interests and constantly stimulate its potentials. This process is often marked with a great number of challenges that educators have to face in their everyday work. Therefore, the empirical part of this paper presents a qualitative study that was carried out in July 2020, with the main objective of examining the issues that Croatian educators employed (or once employed) in nurseries consider to be the most important, as well as the solutions they propose for these issues. The research sample included 12 educators from the Primorje-Gorski Kotar county in Croatia, divided into 3 focus groups of 4 educators of different ages and different lengths of service in nursery work. The sample was selected with the “snowball” technique, while the data were collected through group interviews of the focus groups of educators. The conversations were recorded with a voice recorder and then transcribed. The researchers processed the collected data by using thematic analysis. The challenges of nursery work that were most commonly mentioned by the educators were related to the overly large number of children in work groups, which brings additional challenges such as not being able to meet the needs of all of the children, negative emotions such as dissatisfaction and frustration experienced by the educators, and so on. Most of the other challenges are related to interpersonal relationships within the institution, whether pertaining to communication and cooperation with the parents, expert team, other educators or the management of the institution itself. During the focus group discussions, the educators touched upon some other problems related to nursery work, even though these topics were not part of the research topic or objective. Nevertheless, we will address them in this paper as well, as they also have an effect on the quality of the educational process in nurseries.

Challenges of nursery work ; Nursery ; Educators ; Early and preschool education

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