Education, language and professionalism: issues in the professional development of early years practitioners in Germany

Abstract

In the Federal Republic of Germany, many efforts are currently under way to improve the quality of early childhood education. One starting point is the quality of the professional training of early childhood practitioners. However, discussions mainly refer to input factors, such as the training curricula or the formal level of training. Output factors, such as the professional knowledge base of future early childhood practitioners, tend to be neglected. Here the sciences have a role to play, by developing competence models for the critical analysis, detailed description and purposeful improvement of everyday practice in early childhood institutions. As an example of this direction, this paper focuses on the knowledge base of the language support competence (LSC) of German early childhood practitioners with possible implications for both the continuing professional development of teachers and pre‐service and in‐service training in Germany.

Keywords:

• pedagogical professionalism
• domain‐specific language supporting and promoting competence (LSC)
• architecture of the knowledge base

Acknowledgements

The pilot studies which have been reported would not have been possible without the generous funding support of the Ministry of School and Advanced Vocational Education of North Rhine‐Westphalia and the Ruhr GmbH project. Support was given with much commitment by representatives of municipal and voluntary bodies responsible for early childhood centres in cooperation with educational advisers, also by teacher educators at vocational schools. To all of them the author expresses her warmest thanks. Furthermore, she wishes to express her thanks to all researchers and students who took part in this research project in the context of their studies, in particular to Eva Briedigkeit, Alexandra van Holt, Patrick Isele, Simone Lange, and Birit Koslowski. Above all sincere thanks are offered to the many practitioners who were ready to invest trust, time and energy by taking part in these studies.

Notes

1. According to Dörner (1998) this comprises knowledge which is bound up with affects, emotions, motivation and other attitudes.

2. Several recent and current studies are based on the LSC model, but this paper focuses on a particular survey of the knowledge base of professional educators in Germany.