Browsing by Subject "expertise"

Aims. The aim of this bachelor’s thesis was to study the forms of professional support given to newly qualified teachers and how efficient these forms of support are in enhancing teachers’ professional development in Finland. Previous studies have shown how demanding the induction phase can be for new teachers. The fact that a systematic induction program is not yet available doesn’t help new teachers assimilate new information, adapt to the work community and become committed to the teaching profession. Different kinds of experiments have taken place, however. The purpose of this thesis is to chart those forms of support that help the progress of teachers’ professional development in Finland. The purpose is based on the motivation to promote knowledge and understanding of new teachers’ possibilities to get the help needed. Methods. This thesis was produced as a descriptive literature review. The data was collected by using the databases Helka, ARTO and Google Scholar. Ultimately, six publication that were released between the years 2006 - 2015 and written in Finnish, Swedish or English were selected for the analysis. Results and conclusions. According to the research data, the forms of support for newly qualified teachers varied from an introduction to the working environment within the school to different types of mentoring organised in different parts of Finland. The mentoring programs differed from each other in terms of their duration, content and organizing models. While one-to-one conversations in dyadic mentoring supported the professional and personal growth of the mentees, group-based mentoring also offered social support. After the first mentoring experiments, peer group mentoring was further developed, and it seems that it is the most efficient form of support in enhancing a teacher’s comprehensive professional development.

In recent years, talk about expertise has increased to include new and new occupations in the labor market transition. Since I worked many years with homeless people, I began to think about how the talk about the expertise is appropriate for the social work sector and how the expertise is practiced there. My main objective was to find out how the expertise is shown in the third sector social work with homeless people. From my own perspective, the public sector has structures and frameworks that guide new employees quite strictly how to implement their work, while the third sector has more free working environment where the employee's personal qualities can affect more to the content of the work. In 2002, Hakkarainen, Palonen and Paavola published an article about the mechanisms for creating expertise that, in my opinion, disregarded the personal and emotional capabilities of an employee to become an expert. However, I believe that these characteristics are emphasized in the social sector as an essential part when building up one´s expertise. The purpose of the research was to find out how Hakkarainen and his partners' (2002) three aspects of expertise; the acquisition view, the participation view and the knowledge-creation view are emphasized in the social work. The second purpose was to study what role the personal characteristics play when developing one´s expertise in the third sector. The material of my qualitative research was based on three professional thematic interviews in the social sector, which I implemented as half-structured interviews with using the phenomenographic approach. Prior to the interviews, I became acquainted with the theory of expertise and the literature of homelessness, as well as to the previous research specifically on social work expertise. According to the results, the information required for expertise in homelessness issues was mainly collected from the customer base and at the individual level. Social education was hoped to take better into account the people with whom the professionals will work after their graduation. The content of the work was essentially influenced by the personal skills of the employee, as they determined, not only the nature of the client work, but also the long-term work-life. More public and third sector co-operation was hoped for in order to utilize expertise.

Tämä tutkimus käsittelee suosittujen suomalaisten äitiysblogien asiantuntijaretoriikkaa kaupallissa yhteistyöpostauksissa. Blogeja käsitellään tilana, jota sävyttää bloggaajien asiantuntijuuden ja kaupallisten tavoitteiden yhdistyminen. Tutkimuksessa kartoitetaan miten bloggaajat hyödyntävät asiantuntijuuttaan osana toimivaa kaupallista yhteistyötä. Bloggaajien asiantuntijuutta lähestytään realistisen asiantuntijuusteorian näkökulmasta. Bloggaajien asiantuntijuus nähdään aitona. Tämä mahdollistaa blogikirjoitusten tutkimisen relevantteina asiantuntijuuden näkökulmasta. Tutkimus sijoittuu blogimarkkinoinnin ja asiantuntijuuden tutkimuksen välimaastoon. Analysoitavat blogit ja kirjoitukset valittiin suosion perusteella. Suosion valinta ainoaksi kriteeriksi perustui kaupallisen viitekehyksen tärkeyteen. Mitä enemmän blogilla on lukijoita sitä todennäköisemmin kaupalliset viestit tavoittavat laajan yleisön. Äitiysblogien asiantuntijuutta tarkasteltiin retorisena ja kulloiseenkin yhteystyökontekstiin reagoivana. Aineisto koostui 60:stä erillisestä kaupallisesta yhteistyöpostauksesta, joista etsittiin yhdistäviä piirteitä. Asiantuntijuutta ilmaistaan aina suhteessa johonkin näkökulmaan. Bloggaajien käyttämät asiantuntijuuden näkökulmat ilmenivät tekstissä erilaisten positioiden aktivointina.Tyypillisimmät positiot perheblogeissa määrittyivät lapsi-aikuinen, lapsi-äiti, äiti-nainen ja mina-perhe dikotomioiden kautta. Posiot ilmentävät erilaisia tarvetiloja ja identiteettejä, jotka avaavat erilaisia asiantuntijuusretoriikan mahdollisuuksia. Suoraan postauksen aiheeseen, eli myytävään tuotteeseen tai tavaraan, liittyvät positiot nimettiin taitotasoiksi. Bloggaajat ilmensivät asiantuntijuutensa lähtökohtaa suhteessa omaan taitotasoonsa. Tasot ovat asianharrastaja, neutraali ja noviisi. Taitotasoja käytettiin ilmaisemaan myös tunnetilaa suhteessa mainostettuun asiaan. Tasomuutokset ilmensivät tuotteen aikaansaamaa muutosta. Asiantuntijuusretoriikkaan liittettyjä ekspertiisejä arvioitiin realistisen asiantuntijuusteorian käsitteistöllä. Keskeisiksi nousivat interaktiivinen ja reflektiivinen kyvykkyys, sekä perhe-elämään ja bloggaamiseen liittyvät taidot. Interaktiivinen ja reflektiivinen kyvykkyys viittaavat bloggaajan taitoon ilmaista ekspertiisiään ja kykyyn ajatella luovasti oman ekspertiisinsä puitteissa.

Objectives. This paper examines the epistemic activity of a small group of 7th grade comprehensive school pupils in a single session of innovation. The pupils work together to design and build a "smart pillow". The pupils' handicraft combines electrical engineering and sewing. The study analyzes epistemic search sequences (ESS): situations in which pupils fill in gaps in their knowledge. In these situations, the pupils ask and answer questions in an informed way. The paper explores how pupils negotiate shared epistemic expertise and knowledge construction in their interactions. The paper analyzes the verbal, gestural, and material interactions of pupils. Methods. Conversation analysis (CA) looks at interaction moment by moment. It is based on pupils' interpretations of each other's verbal and nonverbal actions. The primary data for the study is video footage recorded with a single camera and microphone, which was then transcribed. The same group of pupils was previously studied (Davies et al., 2023; Mehto et al., 2020b) using mostly theory-driven methods with focus on a longer time span of collaboration. However, CA brings the pupils' interactions into a data-driven focus that includes microanalytical study of verbal, gestural, and material activities during a single meeting. Results and conclusions. The epistemic interaction between pupils was learning oriented. The analysis showed that the pupils made progress in their work by frequently asking and answering questions (F=157). Through question-answer adjacency pairs, pupils positioned themselves as epistemically knowledgeable (K) in different ways. The analysis showed that pupils who were more frequently positioned as more knowledgeable (K+) asked more informative questions and gave more instructions. Pupils used gestures to guide their work. They used gaze to review information stored both on the prototype and a smartphone. Pupils also showed epistemic evaluation expertise with the use of modal verbs. The pupils approached craft know-how from perspectives of possibility and necessity. The most frequently used modal verbs were voida (can), pitää (must), saada (get) and kannattaa (it is worth).

Changing work as well as changing expertise requirements are an often discussed topic in our current public discussion. In this study, the main interests were the conceptions of expertise and experiences of changing work and expertise requirements. The participants of the study (n=12) were a group of professionals working in a company providing language services. The aim of the study was to analyse how the participants understand expertise and what kind of changes and new expertise requirements they have experienced at their work. The main analytical concept of the study is expertise, and the theoretical framework consists of research literature on expertise on individual and collective dimensions which were compared to the conceptions of expertise among the sample group. The changes the research subjects have experienced at work were thematically analyzed by mirroring their views against some viewpoints on changing work and the historical work types. The study is based on a qualitative research strategy and the material was analysed by applying phenomenographic content analysis. The material was collected through one-to-one interviews. The work related expertise as described by the participants is presented through examples, whereas the phenomenographic analysis focuses on the participants' conceptions of expertise and on experiences of changes of work. To conclude, the results of the study were collected to categories of description. The results clearly showed that the contextual dimension of expertise as experience in the professional field was considered as one of the most important element of expertise. In addition to knowledge, skills, self-awareness and education, expertise was also related to learning new things as a prerequisite for expertise development. Also, knowing the customer was seen as expertise. In addition, respect from others was also seen as part of being an expert. In this material, expertise was portrayed more as an individual rather than a collective quality, even though the work was considered a team effort. The changes at work were related to increasing customer demands, changing technology and financial pressures. Despite these changes, the underlying nature of work was seen as unchanged and overall, the changes were not considered to lead to any completely new expertise requirements.

This study is about competence development in an expertise organization. Also, gender as a cultural and discursive construction was examined. The foucauldian critical discourse analysis and the theory of critical management and organization studies formed the theoretical and methodological framework. As the research phenomenon was understood as discursively produced, power is defined through the idea of government and as a knowledge constituting concept. It was examined what kind of reality, discursive subject positions, and finally, what kind of gender is produced in the discourse covered in this study. The context of the study was an expertise company that provides comprehensive infrastructure services. Managing and leading experts were therefore one of the main themes of the study. The qualitative research data was collected in a research project which concentrated on the possibilities, barriers and preconditions of the competence and career development in three different organizations. The gender viewpoint was included in the research project. The data was collected with a semi-structured interview. In this study nine individual interviews from one of the organizations were used, of which three were managers' interviews and six were the interviews of employees . The data was analyzed with the critical discourse-analytical reading approach when the data was interpreted as the discourse of competence development. The findings identify the examined discourse as a governmental method of discipline which entwines to the business strategy of the company, producing reality about the importance of continuous competence development. It demands employees to define themselves as self-developmental and active subjects. The employees adopted the discourse by constructing themselves as experts who are willing to develop, but who at the same time are challenging hierarchical power relationships. Expertise enables position to challenge manager-subordinate relationships by constructing them as cooperational and equal. Manager-position was constructed as a legitimized developer imposed by the organization as well as a mentor who facilitates the self-direction of the employees. Generally gender was produced as a concept independent of sex. However, at the same time gender was constructed through the differences between the sexes, being either advantage or a barrier for an individual. As a conclusion, it can be interpreted that being a subordinate and a manager seems to be changing and situational in contemporary organizations. The study reveals the changing forms of control in organizations and the requirement of more subjective work.

The purpose of this narrative study is to ascertain how kindergarten teachers perceive their pedagogical responsibility in the context of the distributed organization and how they feel their responsibilities have changed expertise in the development of the over time. Changes in the social environment and the shift towards an increasingly distributed organization model in early childhood education are reflected in to need to review and redefine the pedagogical responsibility of the kindergarten teacher. The aim of the study is to define kindergarten teacher's pedagogical responsibility in a postmodern society and to describe its evolution in the wake of the changing nature of the expertise in question of kindergarten teaching. The study analysed views regarding the pedagogical responsibility from the perspective of different teacher generations. The three generations that became apparent from the study were the generation that witnessed the expansion of children's day care outside the home, the experienced early childhood educators, and the latest generation of early childhood educators who are at the beginning of their career. The theoretical framework for the study is formed by research into both kindergarten teacher expertise and distributed organization. The data included eleven (11) kindergarten teacher's diaries. The data was analysed using the methods of structural narrative analysis (Labov 1967) and content analysis. The data acquisition and analysis methods support the objective in narrative research, which is to "give a voice" to the target group of the research. The research findings show that kindergarten teachers have a clear and structured understanding of pedagogical responsibility and the area of its content that falls under their remit. The evolution of pedagogical responsibility is an on going process, affected by personal characteristics as well as societal and particularly early childhood educators at the beginning of their careers felt a lack of confidence in taking pedagogical responsibility in relation to the other members of their team. Kindergarten teachers voiced a wish that directors of day care centers and the organisation would lend their support to their professional development and to carrying out their pedagogical responsibility. The research findings highlighted the importance of pedagogical leadership as a precondition for high-quality early childhood education. The pedagogical responsibility of kindergarten teachers was studied investigated in the present study exclusively in relation to each kindergarten teacher's own team. However, the shift towards shared pedagogical leadership may be deemed a necessary developmental path in the distributed early childhood education organisation.

Tutkimuksessa selvitettiin teemahaastatteluiden avulla Suomen Matemaatikko- ja Fyysikkoliiton (SMFL) jäsenten käsityksiä työstä ja heidän työssä tarvitsemista kvalifikaatioista. Kvalifikaatiolla tai pätevyydellä tarkoitettiin työssä tarvittavia tietoja ja taitoja. Työllä tarkoitettiin asiantuntijoiden työtehtäviä, jonka lisäksi työtä tarkasteltiin toimintajärjestelmän käsitteen avulla huomioiden työvälineet, työn kohde sekä työhön liittyvä yhteistyö ja työnjako. Lisäksi kartoitettiin käsityksiä työssä tapahtuvista muutoksista sekä niistä seuraavista kvalifikaatiovaatimuksista. Tutkimuksen näkökulmana oli kontekstuaalisuus, mikä ilmeni tutkimuksessa mm. siten, että kvalifikaatioita ja kvalifikaatiovaatimuksia tarkasteltiin suhteessa laajempaan yhteyteen. Tutkimuksessa pyrittiin vastaamaan seuraaviin tutkimusongelmiin: 1. Mikä on jäsenten käsitys nykyisestä työstään? 1.1. Mitkä ovat jäsenten päätehtävät työssään? 1.2. Millaisia kvalifikaatioita työtehtävissä tarvitaan? 2. Millainen käsitys jäsenillä on työn muutoksesta? 2.1. Millaisia muutoksia työssä tapahtuu tulevaisuudessa? 2.2. Miten muutokset heijastuvat jäsenten kvalifikaatiovaatimuksiin? Tutkimuksessa haastateltiin 12 SMFL:n jäsentä. Tutkimusmenetelmänä oli sisällönerittely. Haastateltujen käsitykset työtehtävistään jaoteltiin kuuteen ryhmään. Työtehtävissä korostuivat mm. ennakointi, tutkimus- ja kehitystyö, atk-suunnittelu sekä esimies- ja koulutustehtävät. Haastateltujen työssä tarvitsemat kvalifikaatiot liittyivät tekniikkaan ja työvälineisiin sekä asiakkaiden ja työtovereiden kanssa toimimiseen. Lisäksi he tarvitsivat työssään ongelmanratkaisutaitoja, loogista ajattelukykyä ja tietojen soveltamistaitoa. Jäsenten käsityksissä työstä ja kvalifikaatioista heijastui asiantuntijuuden arvostaminen sekä halu toimia haastavissa ja vaihtelevissa tehtävissä. Työssä tapahtuvia muutoksia on paljon, joista selkeimmät liittyivät tekniseen muutokseen. Kaikki muutokset eivät kuitenkaan vaikuta työhön tai siinä tarvittaviin tietoihin ja taitoihin. Kvalifikaatiovaatimuksiin liittyen korostettiin erityisesti osaamisten monipuolistamista ja laajentamista ja toisaalta tietojen erikoistamista. Tiedot ja taidot vanhenevat nopeasti, minkä vuoksi jatkuva ja elinikäinen opiskelu on tärkeää.

Taking the Social Democratic Party of Finland (SDP) as a case study, this thesis contributes to the understanding of how the SDP and centre-left parties more generally were neoliberalised, this is to say how they became to embrace the idea that society is best organised through markets and competition. Drawing from the work of Stephanie Mudge, the thesis focuses on party experts, those party actors oriented towards producing truth-claims of society, hence affecting the way parties conceive the world and speak. Expert’s knowledge, however, is contingent on their social locations. They are often also situated in professional fields that tend to condition which ideas count as legitimate, making their positions explanatory relevant with regards to parties’ disposition and rhetoric. Methodologically the work draws from the tradition of historical sociology and Pierre Bourdieu’s theory of social fields. The material utilised consists of (auto)biographies; past historical and social scientific research; reference works; SDP’s archival documents; and historical newspaper and magazine writings and interviews. The central argument is that Mudge’s account—taken as the work’s hypothesis—of the neoliberalisation of centre-left parties in “core countries” (the UK, the US, Sweden, and Germany) is inadequate in the case of the SDP embedded in Finland’s peripheral context. Mudge asserts that a central driver in the parties’ neoliberalisation was the interdependence between the political field of the party and the field of economics, which developed as interwar economic disruption incited an intense search within economics for novel ways to control the economy via public spending and demand management. This also led to an influx of academic economists with a “Keynesian ethic” to centre-left parties. The interdependence, however, allowed for economics’ politicisation from the 1960s onwards, this then influencing the field’s reorientation away from Keynesianism and towards monetarism and subsequently leading to the emergence and triumph of new party experts possessing a “neoliberal ethic”. Relatively stable interwar economic development, the bourgeoisie’s post-Civil War dominance in the society and academia, and the Finnish economics’ “backwardness” meant that no comparable need for seeking novel solutions existed nor was there responsiveness for the ideas developed abroad. Consequently, no interdependence between the SDP and economics developed in interwar or immediate postwar years. In the 1960s economic experts did gain a central position within the party. But these experts were not connected with the academia nor did the SDP embrace “Keynesian” prescriptions, the party and its experts instead banking on the combination of economic planning and export-led growth strategy. Neither was evidence found of economics’ politicisation as a left-wing discipline. Instead, it was oft precisely the SDP’s economic experts that critiqued “Keynesian” academic economists. In sum, arguably no interdependence between economics and the SDP developed either in this period. Instead, a new hypothesis is posited as an alternative account, namely that the SDP’s neoliberalisation can be better accounted for through the interdependence that developed between the bureaucratic field’s economic institutions and the party. Conjecturally, the interdependence, owing, among other things, to the SDP’s political appointments to the state, was politicised and the ideas of economic planning and the state’s control of the economy’s important elements were discredited in the context of the 1970s economic downturn. The interdependence, however, also led to novel kinds of experts—the state economists—gaining a powerful position within the SDP and making their interpretation of the economy common sense in the party. These experts perceived that their role in politics was to advance the “general interest” of the nation and the amorphous “people”, not any segment of it. With the export businesses hegemonic in society, in effect, this meant an emphasis on their profitability, cost competitiveness, and inflation and subsequently wage repression and budget constraint. The affinities between neoliberal notions and this policy conception and the habit in the Finnish state to conceive the world in terms of “external necessities” meant the state economists possessed great responsiveness to neoliberal ideas. While gaining preliminary support from evidence this hypothesis requires further work on several counts.