Working conditions of preschool teachers

This study was conducted to determine the working conditions of preschool teachers and to examine them according to demographic variables. In this study, sequential explanatory design of mixed research method was used. The research was conducted with 309 preschool teachers working in the central districts of Van province selected by cluster sampling method for quantitative data and 15 preschool teachers selected by maximum sampling method for qualitative data. "Teachers' Working Conditions Scale" and "Semi-structured Interview Form" developed within the scope of the research were used as data collection tools. While descriptive statistics (mean and standard deviation) and difference analysis (independent samples t-test and One Way ANOVA) were used for the analysis of quantitative data, descriptive analysis was used for the analysis of qualitative data. As a result, in the context of working conditions of preschool teachers, relations with school leaders, colleagues and students were found to be positive. Conditions related to professional development, facilities and resources were found to be moderate, while conditions related to workload and personal rights were found to be poor. When analyzed according to demographic variables, it was concluded that married teachers had a higher perception of workload than single teachers, postgraduate teachers had better relationships with students, paid teachers had more positive views on working conditions, new teachers had more positive views on working conditions, and expert teachers had more negative views on leadership and workload dimensions than other teachers. It was concluded that pre-school teachers had poor working conditions such as lack of knowledge of the field of school administrators, excessive workload, inadequate in-service training content, lack of experts, inadequate physical conditions and resources of the school, lack of assistant staff, uninterrupted work, class sizes and low salaries. Keywords: preschool, teacher, working conditions.