Browsing by Author "Tornberg, Enni-Greta"

Goals. Along inclusive thinking ever more students’ equality and participation has been higlighted in Finnish education system. Finland like numerous other countries has signed many international agreements, such as Salamanca statement and United Nations convention on the rights of persons with disabilites. The development of education according to these agreements has been exposed in many public records in last decades. Variable school culture sets new challenges to teachers and above all requires collaboration between teachers. Co-teaching is one way to react to the challenges of school culture. Goal of this study is to set co-teaching into larger context and investigate what kind of meanings class teachers give to co-teaching and how they react to co-teaching. The purpose of this study is in co-teaching between special education teacher and class teacher. Methods. This research is qualitative research. Research material has been obtained by interviewing three elementary school teachers in Oulu area. Interviews were carried out as theme interviews. The duration of interviews varied between 25 minutes to 45 minutes. The material has been analyzed with qualitative content analysis. Results and conclusions. In this study class teachers’ attitude for co-teaching was found positive. They saw co-teaching to be compatible with inclusive teaching. Teachers emphasized the role of pedagogical leadership in executing the co-teaching. School’s pedagogical administration can support co-teaching by structural arrangements, changing the working culture and by increasing awareness of co-teaching. Co-teaching also caused contradictions. The teachers saw, that disagreements were induced by division of roles as well as interactional contradictions. Conflicts were mainly clarified by discussing. The key points of solving contradictions had been changing the way of acting, self-improvement and support from principal.