VLADIMIR DŽINOVIĆ HAS ACQUIRED PHD TITLE!
Vladimir Džinović has defended his doctoral dissertation titled “Constructing Change: the professional development of teachers in primary and secondary schools“ at the University of Belgrade. Commission for defense consisted of Dušan Stojnov PhD, Professor at the University of Belgrade, Dušan Marinković PhD, Professor at the University of Novi Sad and Tinde Kovač-Cerović PhD, Assistant Professor at the University of Belgrade.
The doctoral dissertation deals with conversational constructs, as a new topic in relationist approach to the psychology of personal constructs. Namely, the efforts to interpret construing as a social and discursive practice are increasingly influential (Procter, 2009; Stojnov and Butt, 2002; Stojnov, Džinovićand Pavlović, 2008; Stojnov and Procter, 2012). The most important innovation brought by this thesis is the idea of construing as a process immersed in a live speech situation. This approach allows us to perceive constructs from a new perspective, as dialogical means created in struggle among various dialogical positions in speech communication. Constructs that interlocutors co-construct in the daily practice of rhetorics the author calls conversational construct.
The doctoral dissertation of Vladimir Džinović represents the contribution to constructivist methodology. In order to analyze conversational constructs, it was necessary to devise a new analytical procedure, since the existing techniques are convenient for the analysis of personal constructs offered by individual subjects. In other words, it needed a new analytical tool, which assumes that the constructs are dialogical dimensions. This analysis the author called the Conversational construct analysis.
The author has provided new insights into how teachers construe their profession through professional conversations by applying the concept of conversational constructs and methodologies for their examination in the context of teacher professional development. In this way he additionally related the psychology of personal constructs to the educational science and paved the way for the popularization of constructivist methodology in scientific research.