engleski

Pre-Curriculum Activities : Focus Groups on Resilience

Current research findings in developmental psychology, educational research, developmental sciences, and neurobiological learning research impressively document the importance of the early childhood years for the cognitive, emotional, and social development of children. A crucial contribution to children’s ongoing success and well-being preschool teachers can make by focusing on building children’s resilience – the ability to rebound crisis through strengths under stress and overcome life challenges. Therefore, a group of experts from six countries (Malta, Croatia, Sweden, Portugal, Greece and Italy) has joined in a specific task: development of European resilience curriculum for early years and primary school children. Along with the curriculum, a manual for parents will be written. However, there are number of ambiguities and inconsistencies regarding what specifically the resilience implies. The ambiguities relate to the conceptualizing resilience as a personality trait, dynamic process or an outcome, defining constructs that constitute it, etc. Having that in mind, expert team decided to organise pre-curriculum activities with the purpose to find out what parents, teachers and children think about resilience, as well as to identify skills and protective factors which are important for them. The main aim of this oral paper is to present the results of some pre-curriculum activities which were conducted in the Croatian kindergarten. Three focus groups were organised (one with the preschool teachers, one with the parents and one with 5-6 years old children). Participants had the opportunity to answer the questions about their opinion about resilience, about factors which are important for building children's resilience and about their expectations from the curriculum. The results of the qualitative analysis of the collected data will be presented. They will lead experts in choosing basic themes for the resilience curriculum and parents' manual.

resilience ; Croatian kindergatens ; focus-groups ; pre-curriculum activities ; curriculum

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