On the day-care teacher’s professionalism – a reflection on institutional everyday life

Abstract

The research, the results of which are presented in this article, was inspired by the interactionist and revised theory of profession, as well as by the idea of situated and embodied cognition. The research material consisted of self-descriptions, conducted over a period of 3 months, of the daily professional activities of a day-care centre teacher on professional training. The aim of the analysis and interpretation was to reconstruct the structure (elements) of the professional working conditions of a pedagogue working in this institution, conditions that are important for the organisation and quality of this work. As the subject literature notes a tendency to perceive institutional conditions as familiar and self-evident, this excludes them from the field of reflection and blocks efforts to consciously change them. On the one hand, the research results have a practical significance; they can be used in the academic training of pedagogues, as they make the conditions of future professional work more concrete (they reduce the abstractness of the content conveyed). On the other hand, they have theoretical significance – if the proposed research perspective is used in the study of different institutions or areas of pedagogical activities, there will be an opportunity to identify common and significantly different factors, which will allow moving towards the creation of an empirically grounded theory of pedagogical professionalism.