The purpose of this study was to develop an educational program to prevent emotional abuse for pre-service early childhood teachers. The program development was conducted as a process of demand investigation, literature review, preliminary research, a ...
The purpose of this study was to develop an educational program to prevent emotional abuse for pre-service early childhood teachers. The program development was conducted as a process of demand investigation, literature review, preliminary research, and satisfaction review, first execution and revision, and final development of the program. The goal of the program was to help pre-service early childhood teachers to recognize emotional abuse, and to pledge that they would not become an emotional abuser. The main contents of the program included orientation, conducting emotional abuse lectures, making newsletters of preventing emotional abuse, picturing their emotional abuse in previous experiences, discussing emotional abuse circumstances in early childhood education institutions, developing tools for emotional abuse screening, becoming a virtual abusive perpetrator, writing letters to themselves as future teachers, and conducting an evaluation meeting during the program. Educational methods included theoretical lectures, making newsletters, discussing and making inferences, creating tools for screening emotional abuse, conducting role plays, and writing letters to themselves. After the pre-service teachers participated in each program, evaluation was conducted, using participative writing and interview methods. The pre-service teachers who participated in this program have learned about the concepts and examples of emotional abuse, thus are expected to be able to distinguish emotional abuse in the field, and to avoid the emotional abuse as a teacher in the future.