Picturing Childhood Connections: How Arts-Based Reflection and Representation Strengthen Preservice Early Childhood Teachers’ Understandings About Well-Being, Belonging, and Place

Early childhood teachers' work satisfaction is an essential prerequisite for their work attainments and quality work outcomes. At the same time, besides their professional well-being, their personal well-being is of utmost importance, which raises the question about the nature of their relatedness. Therefore, this study was aimed to explore the personal and professional well-being among Croatian early childhood teachers. A total of 179 early childhood teachers from the Kindergarten “Rijeka” have participated in this research. Results showed that early education teachers were moderately satisfied with their work. Similarly, results about their personal well-being demonstrated moderate to high levels of optimism, positive emotions, flow, and life satisfaction. Correlation analyses revealed significant positive relationship between high levels of all personal well-being dimensions and high level of work satisfaction. Additionally, it was determined that older and highly experienced early childhood teachers are significantly less satisfied with work and less optimistic.

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Organizational Climate in Early Childhood Education

Journal of Education and Training Studies ◽

10.11114/jets.v6i12.3698 ◽

2018 ◽

Vol 6 (12) ◽

pp. 88

Author(s):

Mefharet Veziroglu-Celik ◽

Tulin Guler Yildiz

Keyword(s):

Professional Development ◽

Early Childhood ◽

Organizational Climate ◽

Early Childhood Teachers ◽

Well Being ◽

Decision Makers ◽

Task Orientation ◽

Organizational Life ◽

Physical Setting ◽

The 1960S

Organizational climate is a concept that may affect individual behaviors, attitudes and well-being in organizational life as well as explain why some organizations are more productive, effective, innovative and successful than others. The concept has been investigated in many disciplines such as sociology, psychology, anthropology, political science, and management for years and was first considered in education at the end of the 1960s. Since then it has been researched in the field of education in many studies. In this paper, the organizational climate of early childhood centers is examined according to the opinions of early childhood teachers. The Early Childhood Work Environment Scale was used to obtain the data. Participants were a total of 214 teachers who work in public early childhood centers in an urban school district of Turkey. Teachers reported on their opinions of ten components of organizational climate: Collegiality, professional development, director support, clarity, reward system, decision making, goal consensus, task orientation, physical setting, and innovativeness. Results showed that collegiality is at the highest level among the components and the most negative opinion was expressed for the professional development component of the organizational climate. The findings are discussed in the light of the related literature. Suggestions for educators, researchers and decision makers are provided.

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