Abstract:

The institution for early and preschool education consists of people with mutually different systems of values, norms and feelings. But in order to be able to function and communicate together within an institution, they need to connect their differences. In this way, the professional development of educators is a common process of all members involved in the educational process as it requires a high level of interaction between members who actively participate in changing the culture of the institution and thus create capacity for change.

Referring to many authors in the paper, we define the culture of the institution as an expression of common, basic settings, beliefs of educators / teachers, professional associates, administrative and support staff, parents, principals, characteristic of the educational institution, and is recognized by the mutual relations of the members of the institution and their common work, management style, organizational and physical environment, and by the degree of focus on continuous learning and research of educational practice.

It was this understanding that was the main reason for conducting qualitative research that aims to gain insight into the personal perceptions of educators about their own profession, professional development and relationships within the institution as dimensions of kindergarten culture. We wanted to explore the meanings that participants attach to the phenomenon of professional development, relationships with others, and a focus on continuous learning and exploring their own practice. Therefore, narrative research with elements of ethnographic approach was chosen as the main methodological strategy, as it emphasizes how each person, event or situation should be viewed in their natural environment and enables the unification of meanings attached to research participants through the so-called personal stories (Barrett, 2009; Cohen, Manion, Morrison, 2007; Halmi, 2013). In this way, we connected the professional development of educators and relations within the institution of early education as two dimensions of the culture of the institution for early and preschool education.

The research was conducted in the Kindergarten Rijeka, Croatia, on a suitable sample of five educators. A semi-structured interview was chosen as the main method of data collection, as it provides participants with additional clarification of the answers, which provides an opportunity for a deeper understanding of the subject of the study. The processing of the collected data was performed by the researcher using thematic analysis (Braun, Clarke, 2012), which starts from transcribing audio recordings of interviews and includes later data analysis, with the main goal of finding the main topics and similarities among coded data. The obtained results of the thematic analysis are presented through thematic networks, which provides insight into the educator's perception and understanding of the relationship between members of the institution as one of the dimensions of kindergarten culture.

Keywords:

Narrative research, professional development, institutional culture, relationships, educator.