Browsing by Author "Aalto, Julia"

The purpose of this study has been to investigate the views of elementary school teachers on teacher expertise and the effects of social change on expertise. The aim of this study has been to determine how experienced teachers perceive teacher’s role and the changes that have taken place, focusing on teachers’ professional growth and the development of expertise. The significance of teachers and schools in society is evident. Education has been on display in the social discourse recently, focusing on the challenges brought by social change. The demands placed on teaching can be seen to have increased, and teachers view the social changes as a challenge to the implementation of the teacher’s and school’s primary task. By examining the construction and changes of teacher expertise, information can be obtained about the work of teachers in the present day and the meeting of demands and resources, so that the teacher’s professional development can be supported. The research was conducted as a qualitative study, using theory-guided content analysis methods, aiming for phenomenological inference. The data was collected by performing semi-structured interviews for six elementary school teachers, each of whom had worked as a teacher for over ten years. The participants of this study saw teacher expertise being formed by expertise in education and training, which includes professionalism and humanity. Teachers emphasized the building of expertise on a foundation of knowledge and, increasingly, educational skills, where the significance of an individual teacher has grown. Social change was seen to bring challenges to education, which require increasingly more thinking and decision-making skills. Teachers emphasized the need to adapt to a diverse world in times of social change through professional ethics and pedagogical expertise. A special challenge for expertise seemed to rise from the limited opportunities to influence one’s work and its implementation.