Rethinking further education

Many challenges await future kindergarten teachers during their eduation at the College for Early Childhood Education and Care

(BAKIP - Bundesbildungsanstalt für Kindergartenpädagogik). One of the most important ones is becoming aware that children acquire their perception of the world through an inquisitive confrontation with the environment.

Consequently, this awareness has far reaching consequences for pedagogical actions - kindergarten teachers are continuously asked to engage in the boys’ and girls’ discovery of the world. For doing so they need a ‘curious’ attitude as well as observation skills.

The project aimed at enhancing the education for kindergarten teachers in order to meet these requirements. Based on a participatory approach, students, scientific researchers and educational professionals worked on a new didactic understanding. In focus were new and innovative research and learning scenarios, having research-based-learning as a guiding principle and observation as a professional method.

During the first phase participants were made familiar with the approach of research-based-learning through junior and senior research workshops, followed by the introduction to socio-scientific methods of observation in specific trainee-programs. Finally the participants had to carry out individual research in the pedagogic field. The dissemination of the project’s data and the results implementation was achieved through audio-visual documentation, a final congress and the foundation of a dialogue-centre.