Inside the Practicum: Crossing the Visions of the Actors

The Role of Practicum for Early Childhood Teacher Education: The Perspectives of Student Teachers

“…In fact, on the discourse of the participants interviewed emerges the importance of the inexorable role of practicum for early childhood teachers' professional development. The data support the key role played by the immersion of the student teachers in professional practice, as is referred in the literature on teacher education [8], [9], [22], [25], [31], [32], [33].…”

“…The dimensions of the questionnaire were defined based on the interview dimensions. In the construction of the items, the data resulting from the analysis of the interviews, the contributions of the literature, the results of previous studies carried out by the researchers [25], and the professional experience of the researchers in the area were considered.…”

“…It is an area totally regulated by the tutelage, since it is the State who establishes the conditions of access to the programs that qualify for teaching, the definition of the type of courses, the structure of the courses, namely, the training components and the respective ECTS, and the professional profiles. The State also defines the mechanisms for regulating the quality of qualification for teaching, evaluating the quality of programs, and ensuring that future teachers develop the skills and knowledge required to practice the profession [25].…”

“…Although the legislation establishes the components of training and their respective weights in the study plans, it leaves room for the courses to be organized according to the conceptions and training models recommended by each higher education institution. Based on the professional profiles of preschool teachers and teachers of other cycles [39], as well as the curriculum of the level of education in which the future teachers will carry out their activity of (in the case of preschool teachers, the so-called Curriculum Guidelines for Preschool Education), the higher education institutions have the autonomy to decide the curricular and elective courses of each curricular component, to select the courses and contents to be taught, the teaching methodologies and the assessment methods for each course [25].…”

“…According to the literature, practicum in the initial teacher education constitutes a facilitating moment of the learning and professional development of the future teacher, due to the concrete experience in the real contexts of work [8], [13], [18], [20], [22], [24], [26], [28], [ [31]. Immersion in professional practice is, in fact, an opportunity to acquire human skills and abilities [10] to build professional knowledge [5], [19], [32], of (re) definition of professional know-how [33]; is a period of supervised, reflected experiential learning [25].…”