Dean of the Faculty of Philosophy, University of Montenegro
Tatjana Novović works as a professor of pre-school and family pedagogy at the University of Montenegro. In her thirty-year-long career, she has worked as a kindergarten psychologist, an education inspector and an advisor for early childhood and pre-school education. She coordinated the preschool education reform in Montenegro, which was launched in 2000 by the Ministry of Education. She designed and conducted a number of seminars for preschool teachers accredited by the Bureau for Education Services of Montenegro, which were then included in the catalogue of teacher training programmes. She participated in and was a speaker at many domestic and international conferences on pre-school and early childhood development and learning. She is the author of numerous papers and articles published in national and international journals, addressing various pedagogical topics, predominantly those related to pre-school education. From 2012 to 2014, she worked as a coordinator for the Evaluation of Reform of Preschool Education in Montenegro research project.
Senior Advisor – Educational Supervisor, Bureau for Education Services of Montenegro
Nataša Golubović has worked as an educational supervisor for the Bureau for Education Services of Montenegro since 2017. Nataša previously worked as a high school professor, a pedagogue, an assistant director and a director of a preschool institution. In 2016, the pre-school institution she managed received the highest national recognition in the field of education. She also participated in the reform of pre-school education in Montenegro. She has served as a member of the General Education Council, a curriculum developer, the co-author of the Strategy for Early and Preschool Education and a member of the commission for drafting the law on pre-school education. Throughout her career, she has attended numerous professional development events and provided training and counselling to pre-school teachers, pedagogues and psychologists. She has been involved in a number of projects such as the Inclusion of children with special needs; the Environmental Project; and the Roma Education Initiative.
The leading theoretical-scientific paradigms, pedagogical-psychological theories of learning, and the dominant models of the child/childhood constitute the foundation of which all concepts for pre-school programmes are based on. The adopted concepts for the programme are designed through various filters, such as: traditional models of work in educational practice; the affirmed best interests of the child; and the teachers’ experiences.
After decades of behaviourally-oriented and didactically-specific structured practice, an open and humanistic-oriented programme has been implemented in the Montenegrin pre-school context since 2000. The transition to a new paradigm meant the transformation of the entire pre-school environment, as well as that of internal and external factors of influence, including the children, teachers, families, the wider community, and other stakeholders.
After two decades of experience implementing the current curricula, we have examined the opinions of pre-school teachers from Montenegrin pre-school institutions on the quality of and challenges in the implementation of the new programme. We have applied a combination of quantitative and qualitative approaches, i.e. a questionnaire (of 260 respondents) and interviews (focus groups) with pre-school teachers from the three Montenegrin regions. The results indicate a high level of understanding of the concept and the efficient implementation of the programme in practice, as well as some contradictory attitudes about the quality of the current pre-school environment.
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