Browsing by Subject "narratiivinen identiteetti"

It is essential to listen and pay attention to the youth in matters that concern them. The right to be heard is written down in the UN’s Declaration of the Rights of the Child and Finnish national curriculum. However, the right to be heard is not wholly implemented at schools and this is especially true in the case of the young who attend special education. By listening the young more attentively could the school institution be better prepared to create school that can educate more diverse bodies of students and be more inclusive. School experiences correlate with educational decisions that the youth make and positive school experiences correlate with contentment with their lives. In addition, the experiences that the young have at school can be seen to be connected with the development of their identities that is one of the main developmental tasks in youth according to life-span theories. Identities can be studied using the narratives that people tell about themselves. The narratives that people create about themselves are part of their narrative identities through which people give meanings to their experiences in form of narratives. The purpose of this study is to examine what a ninth-grade student in special education tells about herself in her school narratives and examine how her narrative identity appears in the narratives. One ninth-grade student attending special education was interviewed for this study. The narratives that were formed in the interview were examined with narrative analysis through which a comprehensive narrative of the school experiences of the interviewed student were constructed. The narratives were also examined using analysis of the narratives with which core themes of the narratives were searched for and formed. The research showed that the narrative, that the interviewed student constructed, was a growth narrative of herself, in which she depicted her changing school motivation and behavior through comprehensive school. In the narratives her attitude towards the school was mainly negative because of her challenges with behavior and learning in primary school. However, her attitude changed completely when she moved to the upper levels of comprehensive school. The central themes in the narratives were growth, future, sports, and others as resources and impediments, through which she constructed meanings for her experiences. The narrative identity of the student appeared to be positive and her outlook for herself and for her future were optimistic which is reflected in the narratives of her overcoming the hardships at school. In the narratives the interviewed student found ways to maintain her well-being, for example, using sports and her family’s support. The narratives of the interviewed student mainly coincide with the statistics of the school experiences and future prospects of Finnish youth. Moreover, the experiences of the interviewed student agree with the results of previous research that showed that students in classroom special education were more content with special education classes than general education classes. According to the previous research the attitudes towards school deteriorated at the beginning of upper levels of comprehensive school that is completely the opposite what happened in the narratives of the interviewed student. Therefore, it is vital to listen to the young so that it is possible to prevent negative school experiences.

The purpose of this thesis was to understand the experiences of the multiethnic people in Finland. This study explored the different aspects of the ethnic identity development process. Thesis was done in two phases. First phase studied the question of how is the ethnic identity developed in Finnish context and what aspects had affected their ethnic identity process. The second phase explored questions as what kind of ethnic identity form the multiethnic people have in Finland and do they have developed cosmopolitan global identities. The aim of this qualitative study was not to empirically measure or define the multiethnic identity, but to open new perspectives of the life and experiences through narrative research. Intention of this thesis was to give voice to 'small' stories of the minority people that are so often shadowed by the 'big' stories of the male of the majority. The first phase of this study included narratives from four multiethnic women. The narratives answered to questions who am I and where do I come from. The second phase data collection was made with narrative forms to 12 self-identified multiethnic persons. The multiethnic people were from three backgrounds: ones with parents from different ethnic backgrounds, Finnish who had lived long time abroad and people from non-Finnish background who had lived in Finland for a long time. The analyzing was made by analyzing the narratives with content analysis that based on the theory of the multiethnic people and by narrative analyzing where short narratives were created of each person. In conclusion the multiethnic identity was found to be a continuous process that lasted through lifetime. Different aspects affected the identification process, including family dynamics, social mirroring and belonging. The variety of different ethnic options in multiethnic person identity process, lacking family support for the both ethnic identities and the feeling of otherness experienced by the multiethnic people in Finland cause additional challenges to the ethnic identity process and results in some cases cultural homelessness. On the other hand the variety of cultural contexts brings flexibility to negotiate between different cultures and languages resulting to positive hybrid identity for some of the multiethnic people. Hybrid identity was sub grouped to cosmopolitan identity and multicultural identity.

In this study I consider how the personnel of a professional organization narratively construct their identities in the context of the “new work”. A specific focus of the study is how the personnel discursively produce and negotiate their identities in their narratives. I approach identity through the concept of narrative identity, which is understood to consist of discursive, dynamic and constantly changing self-concepts that are rooted in cultural discourses and shared and produced in various identity narratives. The study is rooted in social constructionism, in which the reality is seen to be constructed linguistically in social practices. The theoretical framework consists of organization study, and theories relating to the change of work-life in the postmodern society. The key concepts of the study are identity work, narrative identity, social identity, social constructionism and the socalled new work. Identities have been studied in various academic fields such as educational sciences, psychology, sociology and economic sciences. Over the past decades, the narrative approach has become popular in organization studies, and it has been applied especially in the studies of identities. The majority of identity studies in knowledge-intensive companies have focused on manager identities and identification, while assistants’ identities remain a quite unexplored topic of research. The study is a narrative study in a professional organization specializing in demanding expert services. Seven assistants participated in the narrative-episodic interviews in the summer of 2018. The interviews were recorded and transcribed. The transcripts were analysed mainly using discourse analysis influenced by membership categorization analysis as well as position analysis. According to the study, the major narrative resource is the social identity of assistants, produced mainly by making distinctions between assistants and other parties, mainly experts. The social identity of assistants is defined by low status. The narrators position themselves on the lowest level in organizational hierarchy. The social identity seems to carry stigmatized characters such as limited agency and sense of insecurity. Positive identities are contrcuted by positioning oneself as a member of an elite organization, by broadening the job description to include other duties than traditional assistant work, or through other means of individual differentiation. Identification with teams or experts as working partners may also produce positive identities. The organizational reality produced in the narratives reflects typical discourses in the context of the new work. The major discourse identified in the study is the discourse of constant individual development, which seems to be institutionalized in the recent bonus scheme reformation. The discourse involves contradictions that shape identity constructions in multiple ways.