Conference Agenda

This paper is about ways of encouraging the development of visual literacy and mutual communication through research children's reading of Picturebooks. In this research, the Picturebook is served as a stimulating medium for influencing the development of the initial impulses of visual literacy so that even if preschool chlidren can not read, throughout visual literacy they can understand the same story of the Picturebook and connect with each other.

Visual discourse, as one of the main components of a Picturebook, should first provide children with an inviting feeling to turn the pages, because "the aim of the Picturebook is not to offer the child a work of art that the child has yet to learn to perceive, but to enable a kind of fun observation process that can have a didactic dimension in the sense of forming a cultivated artistic view, but in this process the activation of the child's ludic ability of visual perception is more important" (Hameršak and Zima, 2015: 169).

Visual perception is not the same for every reader, through visual literacy one gets the possibility to discover the meaning of visual discourse.

The aim of this work is to investigate how a Picturebook can stimulate the development of visual literacy in preschool children, and which pictorial content of a Picturebook children can read and understand regardless of the language they speak. The second goal is to see how to shape the didactics and spatial material environment in the multicultural kindergarten in order to stimulate children's interest in the Picturebook and it's s visual content as much as possible.

Since the questions related to the research goal are asked with the interrogative words "what" and "how", it is clear that we are talking about qualitative research that describes before putting variables into relationships and testing hypotheses (Halmi, 2005: 56).

In order to achieve the objectives of the research, the following research questions are asked:

a) How can we offer preschool children picture books in order to encourage them to self-initiate the development of visual literacy and then talk about it?

b) What kind of spatial and material environment can encourage children to observe the visual contents of a picture book?

c) What meanings do children of preschool age (5-7 years old) recognize in the pictorial contents of picture books regardless of the language they speak?

Because of the visual content, the picture book must be attractive to children with illustrations so that they will start exploring it through internal motivation and interest, because this is the only way we can encourage the child's full participation and, in the process, understand his perception and thoughts. Then we can also support the child's interest in the Picturebook and use that didactics for mutual communication between children.

This contribution presents the first findings of a narrative review (Baumeister & Leary 1997; Bourhis, 2017) about the development of competences and soft skills for youth participation, in outside school contexts. Competences and soft skills have come into wide use in various fields of knowledge in recent decades and have been used with different and peculiar nuances depending on the context of reference. The aim of the review is to trace the origins and the development of the term “competence”, dwelling on its temporal and spatial origin along with its areas of application, and to unearth the relationship between the discourse of competences and their implications for youth participation in outside school contexts.

Exploring the meanings of the term within the outside school contexts becomes crucial and challenging in our modern world, due to the fact that a lot has been written about competences to be developed within school contexts as well as in the labour market, and a gap in outside school contexts is clearly present.

In recent decades, the interest in the concept of “competence” has intensely grown in various and heterogeneous fields, from economics to business management, from psychology to training, from education to politics, producing an ongoing debate on the topic. Simultaneously, it underwent an interesting development over time, so that we can now recognize a number of definitions that scholars have come up with in the last years (McClelland, 1993; Spencer & Spencer, 1993; Le Boter, 1994, 2000; OCDE, 1996; Levati & Saraò, 1998).

Bearing in mind that different schools of thought have defined the term with meanings not always aligned, the focus will be on how they have been defined specifically in the fields of youth education. Since the mid-1990s of the twentieth century, the EU has also been increasingly interested in competences, considering them as central to education, lifelong learning and work, in the perspective of enhancing "human capital" as a primary factor of development (Conclusions of the Lisbon European Council 23-24 March 2000; Recommendation of the European Parliament and of the Council, 2006; European Qualifications Framework 2008; 2017; Council Recommendation, 2018).

In this framework, my contribution occurs in a special year for soft skills and competences, since 2023 has been named the European year of Skills, right after the 2022 European Year of Youth which sought to empower, support and engage with young people, including those with fewer opportunities. There is a clear relevance given to the topic as the EU is promoting concrete initiatives to support skills development, such as a European skills Agenda planned to promote lifelong learning, to foster economic growth and employment by enhancing training, accompanying society and businesses towards ecological and digital transitions (Employment and Social Policy Council proposal, 12 October 2022).

One of the most relevant EU objectives is directly related to youth political participation by focusing on the engagment of more young people who are not working and not in education or training. To this end, initiatives such as the Skills Agenda for Europe, the new European Innovation Agenda, and the European Universities Strategy are already in place to achieve these goals, founded by the European Social Fund Plus, the Digital Europe program, the Horizon Europe program, and Erasmus+.

Once more, to foster the importance given to “competence”, we clearly understand that the EU is championing skills policies and investments globally (Global Gateway strategy and the Youth Action Plan, 2002) to prioritise investments in quality education systems in partner countries.

At last, shifting to the international level, the United Nations 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development (2015) needs to be mentioned in relation to this topic.

In this paper, I discuss the conceptual definition of student “participation” in teaching activities in my phd-project. I consider why it is relevant to conceptualise student school “effort” differently, when studying the formation of teacher expectations. In this paper I ask the question; what is the relevance of a concept of “participation” in the study of teacher expectations?

I start with a critical perspective on the way that teachers evaluate and attribute meaning to student effort, if swayed by “meritocratic beliefs” (Mijs, 2016, 2021). In a recent study, Geven et al. (2021) suggests that teachers might consent to educational inequality, because they believe differences in educational attainment is due to fair meritocratic principles of educational attainment. In this paper, I argue that meritocratic beliefs can be problematic for justice in education, because a belief in fair meritocratic selection obscures the structural component of inequality in general (Batruch et al., 2022; Mijs & Hoy, 2022). Meritocracy implies that achievement or success is awarded on the account of merit; for students, innate ability and the effort put into school work is believed to determine opportunities for learning and educational attainment (Batruch et al., 2022). Mijs (2021) argus that education in fact distorts meritocratic ideals, by legitimising a lack of achievement as personal failure. But are all students given the same opportunities to learn and achieve?

Teacher expectancy research consistently presents evidence that non-meritocratic student traits have a significant impact on teacher expectations, indicating that opportunities for learning are not distributed solely on account of effort. This provides support for a critique of meritocratic selection. Recent reviews show consistent evidence that teacher expectations are biased against student gender, ethnicity, or socioeconomic status (Murdock-Perriera & Sedlacek, 2018; Wang et al., 2018). Also, high- and low-expectation teachers tend to create very different instructional and socioemotional classroom environments (Rubie-Davies, 2014; Rubie-Davies, 2007) and present more group work opportunities, assign cognitively harder tasks, give more positive feedback, and provide more instruction to high-expectancy students (Aydin & Ok, 2022; Babad, 2010). This suggests that the stratification of opportunities for learning in classroom teaching can be reproduced by bias in teacher expectations and mediated by teacher differential behaviour. This indicates that, while school effort is a prime indicator of merit for teachers, “merit” is itself determined by non-meritocratic factors and meritocracy violates its own merit principle (Mijs, 2016).

I present findings from an observational study of student participation in teaching activities, suggesting that student effort should not be operationalised disconnected from classroom teaching. My findings indicate that the interpretation of student effort changes according to different expectation structures enacted by teachers throughout the course of a lesson. Further, observations suggests that expectation structures determine the interpretation of student effort as either good or bad, while simultaneously being dependent upon form of teaching. Also, students participate very differently under the same expectation structure.

Conclusively, my findings point to the relevance of a different conceptualisation of effort that aligns better with the volatility of classroom teaching, and attribute agency to students according to what is expected of them at different times during a teaching activity. Geven et al. (2021) investigate teachers’ expectations of student’s chance to attain a bachelor’s degree and examine the impact of student traits, but a disadvantage is that they utilize a narrow conception of effort (p. 7). I propose that a concept of “participation” is relevant in this regard. I argue that it accounts for the complexity and changeable nature of teachers’ evaluation and attribution of meaning to student effort and can have important implications for future vignette experiments.