Abstract:

The paper focuses on the issue of preschool children education from poor Roma families. The goal of this paper is to analyse, describe and to depict changes in skills and abilities of children, who attend a kindergarten from their mothers’ point of view. The structure of the paper is based on four pillars. The first pillar contains an introduction of a social and cultural context of the whole issue, as well as cultural specifics of Roma families living in the Czech Republic are being outlined together with the issue of mutual relationships with a majority and the context of education of these children. The second part of the paper deals with connects problems with the Romani living in the Czech Republic with the concept of poverty, that was made by Amartya Kumar Sen. The capability approach allows better theming and analysing those benefits of pre-school education in the lives of children who are affected by the poverty. As a concept that combines the issues with the lack of freedom to activate one´s abilities can be used very successfully during creation of educational programmes that are made for poor children. With regard to the selected concept describing poverty there are other goals and accents introduced in the paper, that pre-school education in the Czech Republic pursues. This part of the paper focuses on selected fields which benefits to the development of personal children’s conversational factors. Specifically, these are fields in the area of school readiness, independence and social relationships, graphomotor skills and development of auditory perception, which is being developed in kindergartens. The fourth pillar of the paper consists of authentic reflection of Roma mothers, who evaluate activities of pre-school facilities. The paper is based on results of terrain research survey, which was made in the children’s natural environment. There are in-depth interviews with Roma mothers of their pre-school children at risk of poverty are used for data collection. The procedures proposed by Anselm L. Strauss and Corbin, who understand the grounded theory as a transaction system, have been used. With the use of the grounded theory these techniques of data processing have been applied, which enabled the development of emerging interpretation schemes, approved axial and selective coding.

Keywords:

Compulsory school attendance, preschool education, capability approach, inclusive education, social exclusion, the Romani, poverty, skills, abilities.