Browsing by Subject "sanaton viestintä"

Aims. The aim of this dissertation was to find out and understand how children view different ways of touching: how they name them, what meanings and situations they associate with different ways of touching, and with whom they see different ways of contact as possible. I examined touch as part of social interaction. The aim has been to understand how touch is used and interpreted differently in different situations. Examining contact from the perspective of children is especially important for teaching. Teachers, school staff, and caregivers of children can take advantage of available research information when working with children. In addition, it helps to pay more attention to touches with children and important features associated with them, such as different individual ways of interpreting and dealing with touch. Previous research has shown that touch is an important means of interaction and can communicate a wide variety of things (Wiio, 1994). Through touch, the teacher can, among other things, help students with school assignments, facilitate concentration, comfort (Tainio et al., 2019), enhance learning, relieve stress, calm down (Owen & Gillentine, 2011), encourage and motivate (Guéguen, 2004) the students. Methods. The material of the study consisted of 30 student interviews collected by Koskettava koulu -project. There were 16 interviews, which two of them were individual interviews and the remaining 14 were paired interviews. In the interviews, students were shown 6 different images, each with different ways of touching. Pupils answered the interviewer's questions about touching and were also free to share their own thoughts about the images and the ways of touches. This dissertation is a qualitative study and I used content analysis and thematic methods as methods. Results and conclusions. Various themes emerged from the students' interviews, the largest themes were: 1. Touch in teacher and school activities, 2. Touch in emotional communication, interaction and expression, 3. Touch with close people, 4. Touch in hobbies and doing things together, and 5. Ritual touch and norms and limits of touch. Pupils often viewed the touch used by the teacher from a positive perspective, and many aspects of helping, encouraging, guiding, and comforting were associated with the touch. The teacher was considered to use touch as part of teaching and interaction with students. The teacher’s touch was often interpreted as positive and benevolent, although in some cases the teacher’s touch could also interfere the student’s concentration. Pupils were positive about touch from the teachers they personally liked. A teacher was considered to touch children when he or she liked his or her students or when the student was succeed at something. Touch was interpreted mainly in school, spare time, and home contexts. Touch contacts were mostly with close people. Touch contacts with strangers were generally viewed with suspicion.

The aim of the study is to analyze and describe the expression of a student's basic emotions through nonverbal communication in a craft lesson. Teaching and learning situations have generally been viewed from the teacher’s perspective, where gestures complement or replace nonverbal communication. Previous research has shown that teacher-student interaction is both social and embodied interaction with materials and tools that happens through figurative gestures. The craft process is approached with the help of three research questions: 1. With what gestures, expressions, body postures and movements does the student express basic emotions in a craft lesson? 2. What kind of clusters of nonverbal communication occur in a craft lesson when expressing emotions? 3. What kind of emotions occur during the craft process? The research data was video recordings collected as part of the Co4Lab research project. In the video, a small team of four students from elementary school worked on a smart product project. The video recording was approximately 11 hours and was encoded with ELAN software and analyzed by content analysis methods based on the striped process rugs technique. For the final research material, 28 individual relevant emotional expressions were selected, which were viewed as individual gestures and movements, and as complete clusters of gestures. Finally, emotions were analyzed as part of the craft process. Emotions were expressed through movements of the whole body as well as variations in the position of the upper body, chest, and shoulders. Expression of emotions was also reflected in movements of the head, hands, and fingers, as well as facial expressions. The ideation of the craft process was reflected in gestures of joy. The discussion about manufacturing and material experimentation caused emotions of anger, frustration and confusion. Making and evaluating digital experiments caused sadness, anger, and joy. Model making was reflected as gestures of joy. The making of the presentation material caused emotion of anger, but the making of the final product was reflected as gestures of joy. It would be good for the teacher to pay attention to emotional expressions so that he/she can better understand the craft process from the student’s perspective and motivate and guide the student.