The paradigm of residential child care, providing education and care for children outside the family is changing worldwide. The emphasis is shifting from a narrow child-focused approach to a more child-and-family centred one, foregrounding the quality of collaboration between parents and everyone involved in the child's care. Several Slovenian studies draw attention to the difficulties of maintaining a collaborative partnership with parents that is based on trust and contact. We introduce the findings of a qualitative research study that included 32 individuals with children in different residential care homes throughout Slovenia. The aim of the study was to analyze the experiences and needs of the parents that could contribute to a better collaboration with the care professionals. The findings show that the parents emphasized the following as important for good collaboration: communication and dialogue, being informed, included and accepted as an important part of the team.
Problems in vulnerable families are multilayered and include the intersection of physical, psychosocial and other forms of distress. The multidimensional nature of the problems of these families is closely linked to the fact that there are many institutions in the field of education, social welfare, health care and others, in which treatment and support are not satisfactory or adapted to their needs. The article presents the partial results of a large-scale qualitative research study, results that refer to the position of vulnerable families in the context of preschool education. The study examined how vulnerability is experienced by parents of preschool children, how the expert workers in the preschools involved in the study responded to the parents’ vulnerability, and how they cooperated with experts from other services outside the preschool. A qualitative research method was used in the study. Data was collected partly through semi-structured interviews with various expert workers employed in two preschools, as well as with the parents of children in the preschools; the interviews were conducted individually and in focus groups. Using thematic analysis (Braun & Clarke, 2006), we have identified four representative themes: amongst parents, the two recurring themes can be subsumed under the headings “from door to door” and “adaptation/flexibility”, and amongst experts, under the headings “powerlessness/incompetence/lack of information” and “power/innovation/sensitivity”. The study finds that the ability to effectively contend with vulnerability presumes a reconceptualisation of the attitude of institutional preschool education towards the family, including a change in the professional role of preschool teachers.
Contemporary educators in schools should possess a number of competences, personal traits, subject knowledge, psychological and pedagogical knowledge, skills and teaching strategies to be able to work with pupils, consider their wide range of learning demands and special needs as well as cope with behavioural and other problems in the classroom. Social pedagogues employed in schools and teachers have to deal with emotions on a daily basis, and so they need to be emotionally intelligent. According to Goleman, major components of emotional intelligence include the awareness of our emotions, managing our own emotions, motivating ourselves, recognizing the emotions of others, empathy, and relationships management. Emotional intelligence in the context of schooling relates to the emotional side of teaching, such as the ability to recognize, define and manage pupils' emotions, to motivate them and to handle interpersonal relationships in the classroom. Emotional competency is the efficacy in social situations with an emotional content. In the article we present an empirically designed study based on data collected in a questionnaire designed for the aim of the study. The research sample includes 108 persons dealing with school pupils on a daily basis; 56 of them are teachers and 52 social pedagogues, employed in the school advisory service. The aim of the study was to investigate how often teachers and social pedagogues use different approaches, methods and techniques for developing the emotional competency of pupils in the classroom. In the article the findings are discussed within the school context and some implications are provided for the higher education of teachers and social pedagogues.
Background The methodological part of the large-scale study on the psychosocial distress of young people in Slovenia focused on vulnerable young people who use drugs and explored the potential of online interventions in harm reduction programmes. We looked at the needs of young people who, at the time of the research, were attending a virtual Discord day centre hosted by the DrogArt NGO or were involved in the organisation's other programmes. We explored young people's knowledge of online interventions, their satisfaction with them, and the opportunities they offer for harm reduction programmes. Methods The study used a qualitative methodology with a combination of deductive and inductive coding, and relied on framework analysis. 18 young people who had used drugs or had stopped using participated in the study. The inclusion criterion was a minimum age of 25 years. In-depth interviews were conducted with the young people, which lasted on average between one and a half and two hours. Results The study showed the potential of online interventions, specifically the virtual day centre, which provide a safe and relaxed space for young people in the sample to meet and talk, which is accessible and where they feel welcome. Online interventions have also enabled some of the sample to engage in the "offline" support types offered within the organisation. The main advantages of online interventions are seen by young people as being more "geographically" accessible and more available during the COVID-19 epidemic. Online support suits some people because they can leave sessions more quickly and it is more informal, while others prefer it because of specific problems or difficulties, such as social anxiety. Conclusions The results show the relatively high potential of online interventions in harm reduction programmes, as well as more broadly for young people with various psychosocial difficulties and who, for example, do not use drugs. These types of support allow quick contact with a professional or peer and facilitate contact with a support programme. Young people are still poorly informed about the support programmes available in Slovenia and would like more information. Thus, in addition to developing and upgrading the network of programmes, we need to focus on providing information to young people through channels that are close to them and can reach them.
Nowadays, increasingly more attention is being paid to the issue of aggressive behaviour, primarily owing to a stronger awareness of children's rights and parents' responsibility to promote them. The number of systematic studies dealing with the relational level and the area of covert aggressive behaviour is limited. In the past, studies investigating aggressive behaviour primarily focused on its most typical manifestation, i.e. physical aggression. In the postmodern period, however, experts have begun to explore different forms of aggressive behaviour which are particularly typical of girls. In this study the authors focused on various forms of covert violence to which girls in elementary schools are exposed. The descriptions of behaviours provided by both teachers and girls reveal a variety of forms of covert aggression among girls as well as a range of related incidents and their causes.
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