Education Sciences

A global decline in students’ motivation and academic performance poses a serious threat to future competence supply, particularly in knowledge-driven economies such as Sweden. Despite higher education’s growing importance for economic and social mobility, the number of students pursuing such education continues to fall. This study employs a mixed-methods design using an explanatory sequential approach to explore how teachers’ leadership identity influences their aspirational engagement in shaping students’ beliefs and intentions to pursue higher education and future career opportunities. The results show that teachers who identify strongly with their leadership role exhibit a type of leadership that influences aspirational engagement with students. This, in turn, may promote students’ beliefs in their potential and intentions to pursue higher education through (1) aspirational engagement in individual dialogues with students, (2) aspirational engagement when introducing new subject areas in whole-class communication, and (3) aspirational engagement related to practical work experience (PRAO). This study demonstrates an understanding of the important potential of teachers’ contributions to elevate society’s future competence supply.

Grounded in stress-reactivity accounts and the Prosocial Classroom model, this study examines how preschool teachers’ responses to children’s negative emotions are associated with teacher job stress and age in Greek early childhood education settings. These frameworks suggest that elevated job stress may erode teachers’ regulatory resources and responsiveness, increasing non-supportive reactions and reducing supportive emotion coaching during emotionally charged classroom interactions. A sample of 101 full-time preschool educators (M age = 42.3 years; 97% female) completed two instruments: the Coping with Children’s Negative Emotions Scale (CCNES) and the Child Care Workers’ Job Stress Inventory (CCW-JSI). Age-controlled partial correlations indicated that higher job stress was associated with more frequent use of non-supportive reactions, including punitive and minimizing responses, and less frequent use of supportive strategies, such as emotion-focused, problem-focused, and expressive encouragement responses. Older teachers tended to report higher supportive response scores, particularly for problem-focused reactions and expressive encouragement. These findings highlight the importance of teacher well-being for the emotional climate of preschool classrooms and suggest that job stress may undermine educators’ capacity to consistently engage in supportive emotion socialization. The study contributes to the education literature by linking teacher stress and emotion socialization practices in a policy context where early childhood education is expanding but remains under-resourced. Implications for teacher education, professional development, and system-level initiatives to support educators’ social-emotional competence are discussed.

Initial teacher education plays a decisive role in preparing future educators to establish meaningful and reciprocal relationships with families that support children’s learning across contexts. Moving beyond traditional, school-centred notions of family involvement, this study adopts a family engagement (FE) perspective to examine preservice early childhood teachers’ perceptions of their preparation, the difficulties they anticipate, and their self-efficacy in working with families. A total of 181 Portuguese preservice early childhood teachers completed a questionnaire comprising three scales: Training Evaluation, Anticipated Difficulties, and Self-efficacy. The Training Evaluation Scale revealed two dimensions (theoretical and practical), which were used in a Latent Profile Analysis that identified three groups (Positive, Neutral, and Low-rating). Participants within each profile showed consistent evaluations across both dimensions. Significant differences emerged between profiles in perceived difficulties, with self-efficacy lowest in the low-rating group. Overall, the findings highlight that variations in perceived training quality are closely associated with preservice teachers’ confidence and their expectations regarding the challenges of engaging families. These results underscore the importance of more systematic, integrated and practice-oriented approaches within initial teacher education to support a shift towards family engagement practices that recognise families as active partners in children’s learning from the outset of teachers’ professional careers.