Browsing by Author "Lanberg, Marianna"

Aims. The study explores different ways to speak about the phenomenon of touch in the written memories about touching in school context. The aim is to specify, based on the data, the presence of public and broadly shared meanings given to touching in school context. Personal memories are interpreted in the socio-cultural context. The broader socio-cultural context is defined as public discourses in the Finnish media and as the official normative documents and discourses defining touching policies in school context. This study is connected to the Koskettava koulu -research project (Tainio et al., 2017-2020) which aims to explore the multidimensional phemonon of touching in comprehensive school context. Previous research on touch studies interaction, meanings and norms defining touching in comprehensive school. Methods. The data were gathered by an open invitation in social media to write about personal memories about touching in past school years. 51 short memoirs (seen as oral histories) were received and analyzed using discourse analysis. The data consisted of both teacher and former pupil positioned memories. Conceptual tools applied in the analysis were voice, dialogue and hidden dialogue based on Mihail Bahtin’s theory of dialogue in language use. Results and conclusions The results indicated that oral history contains present-day public, broadly shared ways to form meanings in interpretative element of the memory. There were three main discourses constructed from the data. First, the teacher discourse argued touching by the essential persona of a teacher and by the professional ethics obligating teacher’s ways to touch students. Second, student discourses indicated touching as a culture guided by the official norms of conduct and comparably touching as directed by the subcultural rules among students. Third main discourse was problematic touch in the school context which indicated molesting as a recognized phenomenon but also silenced tabu-like theme.