TA reflection activity among preschool educators

ABSTRACT

The health, economic and social crisis caused by COVID-19 has forced many preschool educators and kindergarten directors to define and redefine the limits of their professional identities repeatedly. However, to date there is not enough evidence on how reflective activities that seek to help these professionals to negotiate their identities should be articulated, especially in virtual contexts. Nor do we have examples that show us the deployment of this type of activities in practice. For these reasons, in this article we analyze the design and implementation of a training activity aimed at a broad group of preschool educators and kindergarten directors assigned to a local public education ser vice (hereinafter, SLEP) in Chile. The objective of this activity was to develop a reflective activity in such a way that it effectively promoted the construction and reconstruction of the participants' subjective learning experiences, a key issue for them to be able to negotiate and renegotiate their professional identities. Our analysis allows us to conclude that these types of activities must have a series of characteristics to be useful and, at the same time, that there are a series of key aspects that must be considered to adequately assess the quality of the reflective processes. This information is key to promoting the negotiation of the professional identity of preschool educators and kindergarten directors.