Images of the Educational Dialogue of Meanings Occurring in the Portfolio of Early Education Students

Abstract

RESEARCH OBJECTIVE: The aim of this paper is to identify and characterise the specifics of the dialogue of meanings occurring in the portfolio of early education students, considered in the context of the possibilities of educating teachers. THE RESEARCH PROBLEM AND METHODS: The considerations focus on two research problems: What content of the portfolio of early education students demonstrates that they engage the dialogue of meanings with educational issues and their own school experience? What shape does the knowledge about the world as reconstructed by teacher entrants take? To analyse the portfolio, which I treat as legacy data, I use the method of qualitative analysis of text. THE PROCESS OF ARGUMENTATION: In the first part, I reconstruct the relationship between the dialogue of meanings as a component of learning strategies, and the educational portfolio as a tool for monitoring achievements. In the empirical part, I characterise the categories that emerged in the content analysis and show their interconnections with the dialogic assignment of meanings to educational reality. RESEARCH RESULTS: The results of the analysis show that the learning strategy which makes use of the dialogue of meanings and the portfolio enables students to discover the possibility of assigning individual sense to educational reality, not excluding the existence of different perspectives and respecting them. By undertaking a dialogue with personal knowledge and their own experiences, the students gradually went beyond the framework of obviousness and expanded their perspective of thinking about the world of school. CONCLUSIONS, INNOVATIONS, RECOMMENDATIONS: Thinking about teacher professionalism is changing, with the presented analysis providing a view on this matter. It shows the premises and effects of a certain possibility of educating teachers who are open to the complexity of educational reality and to the dialogue preventing its reduction.