Awareness of Early Childhood Period Workshop in Turkey: Current Situation, Results and Suggestions

Abstract

The purpose of this study is to examine the opinions, suggestions and findings of the report emerged as results of Awareness of Early Childhood Period Workshop organized by Association for the Development of Early Childhood Education in Turkey that is the representative of OMEP in Turkey. The topics covered in the workshop concerning early childhood are education, migration, neglect and abuse, values and family in social context. Discussions were held in the groups based on these topics to identify problems and offer solutions to current problems. Document review from one of the qualitative research methods was used to examine the report. The report was analyzed by content analysis. Based on these they were coded and themes were created. These themes were "Problems-Suggestions on the Functioning of the State and Institutions", "Problems and Suggestions from Individuals", "Problems-Suggestions Based on Society". Findings showed that there are limitations in Turkey in terms of reaching facilities in early childhood so poor or/and immigrant children have become even more limited in this respect. In addition to this, it was emphasized that there are inadequacies in teacher training institutions and in the quality of teachers and various suggestions were given about the studies to be done in order to increase teacher training system and teacher quality. Various solutions and models have proposed in order to realize implementations taking high benefit of children into consideration.