Browsing by Author "Väänänen, Tuomo"

According to the idea of inclusion, all children have the right to attend a school near their home. By doing this, the aim is to realise educational equality in society. In Finland, researchers in the field of educational sciences have ended up using the term integration, which better describes the Finnish pedagogic practices in teaching pupils requiring special support. With integration, schools make pedagogic decisions and direct their resources to help the pupils. The aim of the three-step support decreed by Finnish law is to bring support to the child. Nowadays this happens more and more in general education classes.Teachers have learned to record support forms in pedagogic documents (Thuneberg & Vainikainen, 2015). The subject of my study rose from my 15 years of teaching experience and from current societal discussion. I wanted to listen to class teachers’ experiences about the forms of special support and how this support for integrated pupils really functions in the everyday work of general education classes. The study is based on Bandura’s (1997) social learning theory and the concept of self- efficacy. Phenomenological research methods enable the study of everyday phenomena and experiences that rise from them. To define the teachers’ experiences, I had an inside interview with three class teachers. Each of the teachers had at least one special support pupil in their class. The interviews took place in the spring of 2018. The inter-view material was analysed via qualitative content analysis. Material-based content analysis was started during the interviews and I returned to study the material again at the end of 2019. At that stage, the material classified earlier gave rise to three themes: 1. Functional solutions and forms of support, 2. Challenges faced by the class teachers, and 3. Stress from work. The study showed that class teachers plan and execute forms of special support. Realisation of the support varied from school to school. A common experience for all the teachers in the study was the feeling of loneliness in the classroom. Multi-professional cooperation was not functioning properly, teachers felt the need for an extra adult to help in the everyday situations in the classroom. The teachers talked about work-related stress. Their work was stressful especially when a pupil in the class was showing signs of psychical issues and had a difficult overall situation in life. The teachers experienced self- efficacy and were willing to work to make things better for the pupils. In the case of those pupils whose supporting was most difficult, the teachers felt that their support was not successful, and was therefore insufficient. The experiences of the teachers imply that in order to enforce the feeling of result efficacy, attention should be directed to working conditions and development of collective pedagogic planning and operations. Development of co-teaching could provide relief in teachers’ everyday work. In order for special support to be productive, it is crucial that new operational models combining expertise from different professions are developed and implemented inside the classrooms. When a special support pupil is integrated in a general education class, budgetary savings should never be grounds for a resolution.