Browsing by Author "Arteva, Heidi"

The purpose of my research is to describe the coverage of the Helsingin Sanomat newspaper regarding the shortage of early childhood education workers. I want to find out what kind of discourses are produced in Helsingin Sanomat about the shortage of early childhood education workers and how discourses construct social reality. The aim is to create a comprehensive overview of the news coverage on the shortage of workers and to structure the themes emerging from the material to answer my research questions. The shortage of early childhood education workers is severe in Finland, but also internationally. Researchers' interest in analysing the impact of the media on education and teachers has grown over the past decades. I conduct my research as a qualitative discourse study using discourse analysis as a methodological approach. My research material consists of 30 articles published in the digital online service of Helsingin Sanomat between 1 January and 15 August 2023. The results of the study have been generated by locating discourses of employee shortages that can be found in the data, examining the groups of speakers that produce them, and analysing what kind of social reality they construct. Three dominant discourses emerged from the data: the discourse of concern, the economic discourse and the social discourse, as well as six main groups of speakers: early childhood education and care staff, parents, experts, students of early childhood education and care, municipal decision-makers and politicians. The social reality of the shortage of workers was constructed on the basis of the discourses formed from the data as rather negative and critical.