Paper Title
Contextual Determinants of the Development of Children’s Expressive Potential in Kindergarten

Abstract
The realisation of quality educational work with kindergarten children greatly depends on the readiness of the educator to have a good understanding of the child, its perspectives, experiences, knowledge and understanding. These can be discovered via various forms of children’s expressions, i.e. their symbolic capacities that (Malaguzzi, 1998) calls “a hundred languages”. These include artistic, graphic, kinaesthetic, verbal, gesture and many other “symbolic languages”, i.e. expressive modalities. The most developed pedagogical conceptions and curricula place great emphasis on creating the conditions for the continuous development of various expressive modalities in children, which they can use to symbolically represent their knowledge, ideas and emotions. The perspective of the development of children’s expressive potential in various institutions does not depend only on the children, but on the features, i.e. the quality of the educational practices of the kindergarten. When attempting to improve the conditions for the development of children’s expressive potential in kindergarten, it is necessary to acknowledge the systemic features of the educational process, as well as its non-linearity, complexity and unpredictability. The paper presents a qualitative research and explains the reason why the authors opted for the interpretative, naturalistic and phenomenological research approach. Since the intent was to research the existing practices, but also to gradually improve the possibilities of developing children’s expressive potential in kindergarten, an action research was conducted as a methodology for simultaneous research and change in the educational practice which relies precisely on the development of the practitioners’ research and reflexive skills. Elements of the ethnographic approach were used in various stages of the research, in order to understand the manner in which certain subjects (children and/or educators) understand and interpret individual activities. The paper questions the relationship between the development of the children’s expressive potential and the quality of the spatial-material environment in the kindergarten, the quality of the educational interventions by the educators, the democracy of the educational process and the manners of evaluating the children’s activities and achievements. Keywords - Action Research, Expressive Potential, Children’s Symbolic Languages, Educators’ Competences