Browsing by Author "Salo, Anni-Mari"

Goals. ‘School climate’ is an abstract concept that is difficult to define. As a phenomenon, however, it definitely exists and has a huge importance for learning, studying and working at school. I am interested in school climate because as a future teacher I will have an important role in building and developing it. The purpose of this research was to increase understanding of school climate as a comprehensive phenomenon, in particular in connection with school bullying. Bullying was chosen as a research angle because it is an important and timely topic. The aim was to explore how school climate is addressed in literature on school bullying, which is actively used by teachers to support their work. Methods. This study is a descriptive literature review. Recent Finnish handbooks on school bullying were used as data. The data consisted of two books, one article, the teacher’s guide for the KiVa School Anti-bullying Programme and the web material for teachers of the Mannerheim League for Child Welfare. The data was analyzed by thematizing text fragments that addressed the topic of school climate. These categories were used to discuss how ‘school climate’ appears in the data. Results and conclusions. The results indicate that handbooks on school bullying discuss the phenomenon ‘school climate’ in many different contexts. The strongest strands of discourse emerging from the data were: 1) school climate as a factor preventing bullying, 2) school climate as an anti-bullying school culture or a culture permissive to bullying, and 3) school climate as an issue affected negatively by bullying. School climate thus appears as a varied phenomenon with interwoven causes, effects, preconditions and expressions.