Browsing by Author "Nykänen, Hanne-Maaria"

The goal of the thesis was to examine 1) whether the special education teachers' and other teachers' educational stances show mutual differences in the areas of classification or categorization, and 2) which kind of imaginal characteristics is it possible to build by using teachers' stances. In the theoretical framework classification or categorization was spread into more specific themes which were automatic thinking, medicalization, separate special education, labeling, social disability studies and social constructionist language. The sense of the thesis was explorative, considering that the concepts of classification or categorization haven't been exactly framed in special educational studies. According to previous research it seems that there exist mutual differences when comparing special educators' and other educators' attitudes concerning the educational system overall. The data was collected in the areas of Helsinki and Turku cities by using an E-questionnaire. Along with the background information the questionnaire included 48 educational claims which were estimated by a Likert scale from 0 to 5. There were altogether N=119 answers gathered from class teachers, special education teachers, kindergarten teachers and special kindergarten teachers. Summaries were counted and explored through frequency analysis in the four occupational groups. Mann-Whitney's U-test was proceeded to answer to the first task of the research. The test's purpose was to examine the differences of summary medians formed by special education teachers' and other teachers' answers. Explorative factor analysis was completed to answer to the second task, to find out which kind of characteristics the correlations between the teachers' answers would reveal. According to the Mann-Whitney's U-test there was discovered that the educational attitudes of special education teachers were more categorizational around theme of medicalization, both in the direct claims (p=.049, r=.19) and the opposite claims (p=.005, r=.30). Also it appeared that the special education teachers' educational attitudes were more categorizational (p=.057, r=.18) than the other teachers' attitudes when supporting the separate special education system. Nevertheless the latest mentioned result wasn't found to be statistically significant. The explorative factor analysis revealed four characteristics, 1) the one being aware of language and against labeling, 2) the one being an aware thinker who demands social equality, 3) the one supporting medicalization and seeing speciality being absolute, and 4) the character positioning against medical culture and individualism.