Profession- and career motivation factors in the case of first-year kindergarten teacher students

Abstract

Today, motivation for a pedagogical career, which includes its existential, organisational and infrastructural conditions, differs from the degree of commitment to the profession of education. The latter can also be experienced in an informal way or outside the public education institutional system. As the first step in our research on profession- and career motivation, we conducted a survey among first-year kindergarten teacher trainees at the Faculty of Teacher Training of the Károli Gáspár University of the Reformed Church in 2019/20 and 2020/21. By structured content analysis of students’ freely edited motivational essays we tried to explore the professional and career characteristics that influenced students in applying for training. Differences between full-time and correspondence students were a prior aspect in order to investigate whether correspondence students have a different motivational base due to their life and work experience. Results of the research show that the majority of attractive factors can be classified as professional motivation when choosing kindergarten teacher training. It was also found that correspondence students’ motivation is more versatile and mature compared to full-time students. There are more immature and naive ideas about the pedagogical career among full-time students, while family-friendly schedule and variety of the teacher career is more motivating for correspondence students.