Browsing by Author "Linnanmäki, Nea"

Aims. Recently, the interactional side of teaching has been emphasized in the school environment. At the same time, the aspect of knowledge continues to exist. Combining the dimension of knowledge and the dimension of humane presence, from the point of view of teaching, has not been the topic of the recent discussion in the field of pedagogy. There is still unclarity how these two dimensions merge in practice in teaching. The focus of this research is the dialogue between the dimension of knowledge and the interactional dimension of being a teacher. The aim of this re-search was to find ways how teachers can balance between these dimensions. The framework of this study builds upon a theory of a teacher profession by Malinen (2003) which provides tools for theoretical scrutinizing. There does not exist any further empirical research utilizing on Malinen’s (2003) theory. In the framework of this research, I place the scrutinizing the different dimensions of being a teacher into the context of dialectic. This way I deepen the conceptual understanding of the dialogue between the teacher dimensions. Methods. This research is a qualitative research and the data has been collected with theme inter-views. The subjects of the study were five class teachers who all had different work experience in education and they were from different age groups. All the subjects were in different phases of their careers and they worked in different schools. The interviews were transcribed and analyzed using content analysis and Malinen’s (2003) theory. The interviews focused on the teachers’ own exper-iments of their professional role. The analysis of this research was a theoretically oriented empirical analysis that used both data-driven analysis and theory-driven analysis. Results and conclusions. The results offer an empirical model of how Malinen’s (2003) theory’s epistemic and existential dimensions manifest in the context of class teacher’s work. Furthermore, the results provide a theoretical model which develops further the theoretical parse of epistemic and existential aspects on the basis of Malinen’s (2003) theory. These results provide concrete tools for teachers to use in practice and how teachers can balance between the different aspects of being a teacher. On the other hand, the results also offer an improvement on the theory a teacher profession in the theoretical research field of pedagogy. The results display and classifies empirically how epistemic and existential dynamics play out in teacher’s profession.