Browsing by Subject "opettajan toimivalta"

The social life of modern youth has expanded from the physical world to also include the virtual world. Because of this is completely natural to see bullying spread into the world of internet as well. Thus bullying knows no time nor place and can instead happen both during free time and at school. The different ways, influences and preventative methods of cyberbullying have been studied before (Patchin & Hinduja, 2012), but studies from the teachers’ point of view, especially of which situations do they feel obligated to resolve, are almost nonexistent. This study aims to fill that hole and simultaneously discover how teachers define, encounter, prevent and act in cases of cyberbullying or conflicts. This study was conducted as a case study in 2019. The research material was collected by interviewing six teachers with teaching experience, using a semi-structured theme interview. The material was transcribed and analysed using content analysis. The analysis was conducted using the Atlas.ti-program. The results showed that teachers did not encounter cyberbullying very often. They mostly mediated arguments taking place in virtual environments, before they could develop into bullying. The situations they did encounter were handled with discussions and by contacting the students’ parents. Preventative work was done actively in schools. The teachers themselves felt that handling cases of cyberbullying was mostly up to the parents. Even so, if the needs of a student demanded it, or if bullying was noticed in the classroom, the teachers started handling them themselves. Based on the results it can be stated that teachers need guidelines to specify which cases of cyberbullying are a part of their duties, especially when the bullying happens outside of the school day. At the moment, teachers define their respective roles very subjectively, which can lead to inequality between students, depending on the teachers subjective definition.