Browsing by Author "Maalo, Iiris"

In United State of America compassion of work culture and work community has been researched for years. In Finland has been studied same kind themes of compassion, like empathy and sympathy. The Finnish project CoPassion lasted three years until it ended last year. According to results compassionate working culture increases welfare of the work community and also grows profit of the company. Nowadays working culture is busy and requires creativity, so it is important to take care of work well-being. Early childhood educators work with people, so feelings and interaction are essential and those issues reflect on children. This is qualitative research, which studied what kind of suffering and compassion experiences first year students of early childhood master’s degree have. The aim was to find out what kind of things made people suffer and what kind of feelings followed up. The other aim was to find out what kind of compassion acts had people done and what kind of feelings came after the compassion acts. The students wrote freely about “compassion”. The research consist of 20 narratives. The narratives were analysed by content analysis. The analysis found five themes: source of suffering, feeling of suffering, giver of compassion, compassion act and feeling of compassion. After the analysis the themes were organized to a matrix. The themes were organized by sources of suffering: Work, Conflict in work community and Personal life. According to the results all of compassion acts were verbal and nonverbal. In Work- theme suffering was caused by problems in work of early childhood education. There were disagreements of personal values and also feelings of inadequacy. In Conflict in work community -theme professional conflicts caused suffering. At first the aim of narrators were good, but in the end other persons attacked them because they didn’t have a same opinion. The narrators felt desperation and questioned their own professional ability. In Personal life -theme suffering was caused by narrators’ personal life, like problems in relationships. Shock, fatigue and sadness were caused by sufferings of personal life. Acts of compassion were encouragement and discussions. Acts of compassion were experienced to be essential, because narrators got feeling that they were understood. Early childhood education is ponderous work and there is lack of resources. There should be done more research about compassion fatigue or fatigue of ponderous work and how fatigue affects well-being of individual and work community. Climate of early childhood education will affect the children, who are future of Finland. How could compassion affect positively the well-being of individuals and work community?