The Competences of Pedagogues Ensuring Successful Partnership with Parents of the Contemporary Generation: the Attitude of Students – the Future Pre-school Teachers

Abstract

The change of society, in particular concerning the generation of contemporary parents, imposes new requirements on pre-school education teachers and their competences. In case of teachers, it is not only pedagogical literacy, consisting of general, psychological knowledge, as well as knowledge about the child that are necessary. The skills of activity planning and organisation, organisation of education process, active involvement in the change of pre-school education system are also required. Moreover, the competences of communication and collaboration with parents, the ability to adapt and find necessary access to parents of the contemporary generation, the ability to involve them into the activities of an educational institution, empower parents to become competent partners of teachers are of appropriate significance. All these skills, although within different scopes, are taught and developed by future pre-school education teachers during their university education and internships. The aim of the study is to reveal, according to the opinion of students – future teachers - which pre-school education teacher competences are the most meaningful in order to ensure a successful partnership with parents of the contemporary generation. The applied research methods are as follows: the analysis of content of scientific information resources (to reveal the theoretical context), questions in writing (to collect empirical data) and content analysis (analysis of empirical data). The scope of qualitative research is 18 informants who agreed to participate in the research. They are students – future pre-school education teachers. The study results showed that the informants mostly emphasise the competence of pedagogical literacy that includes knowledge about the child, personal features of teachers helping to promote partnership relations with parents and students of the contemporary generation, professional expertise and values. The following features were accentuated: patience, self-confidence, benevolence in communication with parents of the contemporary generation with different attitudes and expectations. Future teachers did not focus on the competences of education process organisation, i.e. the ability to organise education process based on human resources – the parents. Thus, parents are not sufficiently involved in the education process. They pay little attention to the competence of activity prediction and planning.