The Practicum in the Degree of Early Chilhood Education: analysis of teaching journals

Abstract

The Bologna Plan for teacher training advocates expanding the traditional teaching role of teachers, while also entrusting them with a research role. At the same time, university professors are challenged to meet the new demands that require providing teachers with sufficient resources to respond, with the highest possible quality, to the needs of modern societies. The Practicum offers future teachers opportunities to train both functions in real professional contexts, increasingly diverse and complex. Stays in schools provide scenarios in which to carry out some educational research through reflective self-evaluation, thus initiating a strategy for acquiring the necessary research competence, an unavoidable component of professional identity. In these circumstances, the teaching diary becomes important, understood as an instrument that favors a reflective and investigative attitude. METHOD We analyzed, with NVIVO 12, the content of professional diaries written by students of Early Childhood Education Teacher Training of the Faculty of Education of the University of Salamanca, during the stay in schools corresponding to the Practicum of the last year of training. From the analysis emerged the categories educational context, teachers, students and families. RESULTS The results show that the reflections are mainly focused on the teachers' tasks. DISCUSSION The conclusions offer clues about certain characteristics of current training that will serve as a starting point to guide university faculty on the direction to take in order to contribute to the professional development of future teachers. They endorse the teaching diary as a possible alternative to be taken into account among the strategies leading to the acquisition of research competence by Early Childhood Education teachers, provided that it is approached from the necessary self-scrutinizing viewpoint and, preferably, guided by university faculty in order to achieve a good level of depth.