Browsing by Author "Maikkola, Miia"

The purpose of my Bachelor’s Thesis is to examine the views that Finnish class teachers hold about the professional status of their occupation in the postmodern society. I also aim to survey their sentiments concerning the professional position of their field in the course of time, i.e., in the historical and future perspective. The alternative approaches to the concept of profession form the theoretical basis of this Bachelor’s Thesis, along with an analysis of the circumstances surrounding the professionalization of the Finnish class teacher’s occupation. The research for this thesis was qualitative in nature and methodologically phenomenological hermeneutical. A partially-structured themed interview was the more specific method. Three class teachers were interviewed for the purposes of the research. Discursive analytical strate-gies were applied to examine and analyse the interview-derived information, alongside more established qualitative content analysis. The study shows that Finnish class teachers regard all so-called descriptive characteristics of a typical profession as being part of their professional identity, yet they do not perceive their occupation as a fully developed profession. The interviewed teachers consider their expertise as more fragmented and as being under constant change as opposed to the Finnish class teacher of before. Researchers find these facts, beside the controlling position of the state, as main elements in the deprofessionalization of teachers in the Nordic countries. The conclu-sion of my research finds that Finnish class teachers identify with the concept of a semipro-fession, rather than perceive themselves as a full-scale profession. In further study it might be of interest to investigate the potentially different perceptions of one’s own professionality in teachers with alternative educational backgrounds. Subject teachers, for instance, could provide interesting perceptions considering teacher’s profession-ality as compared to class teachers, given the respective emphases of their teacher education programmes.