Ecological conditions and interpersonal skills leading to ECE teacher competences in working with immigrant children in Slovenia

Abstract

The purpose of this study is to analyse which ecological conditions (professional background and support from the environment) and interpersonal skills (values, attitudes and emotional competences) predict ECE teacher competences in working with immigrant children. The results of the hierarchical regression analysis revealed that interpersonal skills are stronger predictors of teachers' competences than ecological conditions. The results of network analysis indicate specific in-depth relations among teachers' competences and the analysed variables. The study is important as it combines ecological conditions as contextual factors and interpersonal skills to better understand how to support ECE teachers in a multicultural environment.

Discursive Norms and Incentives for Equipping Students with Religion and Worldview Literacy in Swedish Preschool Teacher Education Policy

“…For example, Abraham and Margrain (2022) show that intercultural practice is a concern connected to professional preschool teacher practice that is asked for by students themselves during their education. Both national and international studies of PTEs and other teacher programs (e.g., Bayati 2014; Layne and Dervin 2016;Rosén and Wedin 2018) show problematic "othering" and excluding discourses related to ethnicity within the education studied, which underline the need pointed out by Rissanen et al (2016) and Licardo and Leite (2022) to create safe spaces to support students' self-reflection and discussion. Rosén and Wedin's (2018) study shows how students in PTEs position themselves and are positioned by others within diversity discourses, where certain students are positioned as "the others".…”

“…Returning to the issue of educating preschool student teachers in intercultural and interreligious competencies, this has been examined to a higher degree in international research on teacher professionalism in higher education (See Rissanen et al 2016Rissanen et al , 2020Kuusisto 2017) than in Swedish research. For example, Rissanen et al (2016) and Licardo and Leite (2022), based on their results, point to a need for teacher educators to be able to teach accurate knowledge content and show that using relevant teaching materials and experiences is considered helpful for PT students to gain intercultural competence. In a Swedish context, both Bayati (2014) and Stier and Sandström (2018), based on their results, argue that preschool teacher educators need to work more systematically with intercultural pedagogy and intercultural communication and to increase discursive awareness.…”

Early Childhood Teacher's Pedagogical Competence

“…The realization of learning and educational goals that occur in schools is one of them influenced by teacher competency factors. Teacher competence can also be interpreted as the scientific ability of teachers to carry out their duties responsibly [10], [11].…”