Pre-service preschool teachers in interactions with a child: Microanalyses of teacher's handling of child's communication initiatives

Abstract

This paper deals with an important component of professional life of preschool teachers, which is interacting with children during the educational activities in kindergarten environment, with a focus on supporting the preparation of future teachers who should develop their communication skills. This paper aims to familiarize the reader with the findings brought by a qualitative analysis of video recordings of students of preschool teaching during the realization of their continuous practice in kindergarten. The aim is also to refer to possibility of using video analysis of interactive situations with students studying teaching not only for the research purposes, but also for encouraging reflection and skills development of future preschool teachers. This opens up space for the knowledge on communication strategies of future teachers and for targeting and individualizing training and preparation of teacher candidates and also for required linking of the research findings to education. Video studies of interactions in educational activities in kindergarten offer a variety of possible topics for research, they help with capturing the real form of communication between teacher and child. In our paper we decided to focus on the work of pre-service teachers with communication initiatives of a child during educational activities managed by the teacher. These are 18 micro-educational situations (each of a few minutes) in two classes of kindergarten with different age composition of children (3-4 years and 5-6 years old children) with a focus on the development of scientific and language literacy and initial mathematical concepts as a content of education. Data in the form of transcripts of recordings of micro-educational situations were processed via systematic open coding and this analyze brought the findings on the strategies of future teachers in response to the entry of a child into the communication that goes beyond the passive role of the child as being only the recipient of teacher ' s questions. However, students of preschool teaching in our study also often demonstrate their dominance in communication and they suppress the speech of a child as active and equal communication partner. Data from video recordings were further accompanied by statements of participating pre-service teachers in the form of a written reflection of their own acting in the teacher's role when interacting with children.