Browsing by Author "Nivala, Juulia"

Aims. Emotional learning teaches students to recognize, name, express and regulate emotions as well as understand the emotions of others. The popularity of emotional learning has grown recently, with an increasing number of primary schools in Finland adopting some forms of emotional learning programs. The purpose of this study was to bring a more everyday perspective to the research field of emotional learning. This thesis is focused on studying class teachers’ perceptions of everyday emotional learning situations and the factors that challenge or promote everyday emotional learning. The goal was also to under-stand and construe the concept of everyday emotional learning through the perceptions of class teachers. Methods. This thesis is a qualitative study with a phenomenographic approach. Phenomenographic research aims to examine people’s, in this case, classroom teachers’ different perceptions of a phenomenon. Semi-structured thematic interviews were used as the method of data collection. Seven classroom teachers were interviewed for this study. The data was analyzed using phenomenographic analysis approach. Research and Conclusions. The findings composed three systems of descriptive categories. The first system of descriptive categories, or outcome space, focused on class teachers’ perceptions of everyday emotional learning situations. Based on the perceptions of class teachers, three descriptive categories were formed, indicating that an everyday emotional learning situation can involve either an individual student, a group of two or more students, or the entire class. According to the results, everyday emotional learning has a spontaneous and a planned dimension. In this study, based on the teachers’ perceptions, the planned dimension was related only to the emotional learning situations involving the entire class. The second outcome space combined two systems of descriptive categories. Ten descriptive categories formed five opposing pairs: promoting and challenging factors related to the teacher, student, home, school, and resources. The descriptive category left without an opposing pair contained class teachers’ perceptions of the challenging nature of emotional learning. Given the diverse nature of emotional learning, careful consideration of various elements is essential for its development. Further research is needed particularly on the everyday aspect of emotional learning.