Opettajien tunnenarratiivit ja niiden rakenneanalyysi - Musiikin ja matematiikan aineenopettajien opettajuus ja elämänkulku

Abstract

Opettajan työhön ja tunteisiin kohdistuva tutkimus kuvaa opettajien tunteita, opettajien kokemuksia ja opettajuutta, joka rakentuu opettajahaastattelujen tunnepuheessa.

Musiikin ja matematiikan aineenopettajat puhuvat työstään eettisin sävyin. Opettaja välittää ja auttaa, tuntee työn kutsumuksekseen, toimii tasapuolisesti ja hallitsee omat tunteensa. Hän innostaa oppilaita opiskeluun. Edistääkseen oppimista opettaja poistaa oppilaiden pelkoja ja luo turvallista ilmapiiriä. Samaan aikaan opettajuus merkitsee riittämättömyyden tunteita, väsymystä ja jopa uupumusta.

Haastattelujen pohjalta muodostetut opettajien elämäntarinat tuovat esiin tunteiden sosiaalisen ja vuorovaikutuksellisen perustan. Loppuun palamiseen liittyvät tapahtumat ovat herättäneet kielteisiä tunteita, joiden alkuperä on työyhteisön vuorovaikutussuhteissa ja jotka ovat johtaneet esimerkiksi työpaikan vaihtamiseen. Yhteistä elämäntarinoiden käännekohtien ja muutoksen hetkissä on niiden emotionaalisuus.

Tutkimuksen tulosten pohjalta on mahdollista tehdä johtopäätös, että opettajan työ on perustaltaan eettistä ja vaatii emotionaalista työtä. Opettajuudessa on edelleen keskeistä sitoutuminen toisen hyvään. Tutkimuksen merkittävyys käytännön opetustyön kannalta syntyy opettajan työtä koskevien yhteisten olettamusten ja ajatusmallien näkyväksi tekemisestä. Tutkimus tarjoaa mahdollisuuden ymmärtää, miten monin tavoin tunteet ovat läsnä opettajan työssä.

The aim of this research is to understand the emotional nature of the teaching profession, how teachers experience their work, and what kinds of professional identities music or mathematics teachers construct through spoken emotional expressions about their work and everyday lives. A teacher develops and acts as a member of a certain society, studies and works in a certain community at a certain time. To be a teacher is not simply a matter of personal qualities, but of the possibilities and limitations of a given culture.

In this research, professional identity is seen and studied as something constructed through speech, and the construction of identity through speech is seen as a process of positioning in which emotions play a central role. Through this approach, the significance of emotions in situated conditions in the professional lives of teachers is emphasized.

I define emotion as a process which is social and bodily in origin. For emotion to exist, there must be those who experience it, who feel the feeling.

The empirical data of my research consists of interviews with five experienced music teachers and three experienced mathematics teachers. At the time of the interviews, five were teaching music and three mathematics to grades 7 to 9 of the basic comprehensive education, with pupils ranging in age from 13 to 15 years.

I carried out my research based on the collected data. During the early phases of the analysis, I discovered that the interviews with the teachers were made up of numerous small stories. I called these emotion narratives. By emotion narrative, I refer to a story or part of the interview which constitutes a narrative entity and whose subject may either be an emotion or something else which is actually a description of a feeling.

In my research, I pose the question of how teachers´ emotional speech is linked to descriptions of their life history. To respond to this question on the basis of the teachers´ interviews and emotion narratives, I outline their life stories. The first task of the stories was to shed light on turning points in their lives and the emotions surrounding these turning points. The teachers? life stories bring out the social and interactive nature of emotions. Moreover, the feelings appear to decidedly direct solutions pertaining to the life histories. The second task of these stories, as well as of my research as a whole, was to open up new opportunities for understanding the nature of music and mathematics teaching along with the actual teaching/professional world of teachers.

The analysis proceeds by discovering and categorizing emotion narratives within the data. I classified the emotion narratives contained in the interviews into groups according their emotional content and tone, as well as what kinds of actions connected to emotion were reported. This gave rise to the narrative categories of love, inadequacy, emotional understanding, and emotional actions. The next phase of analysis was to interpret how music teachers define and position themselves, students, and other actors within these narratives.

In the love narratives, the teacher is positioned as a philanthropist and helper, one who inspires and who is a teacher by calling. Some of the love narratives recount the teachers? closeness and relationship with music. The inadequacy narratives are concerned with the teachers´ feelings of inadequacy, inability, powerlessness, ineptness, inability to cope, or weariness. In these narratives, the teacher assumes the positions of survivor, quitter or adapter, and victim.

To the category of emotional understanding, I assigned those narratives in which the teachers spoke of comprehending the situation and of sympathy, sensitivity, or appreciation. This put the teachers in the position of those who understand, who help and who are in control of the situation. The teachers also spoke, among other things, about changing pupils? attitudes, banishing fears, and giving inspiration. Since this is a matter of activity directed towards the emotional state of another individual, the pupil, I classified these narratives as emotional action narratives. In emotional action narratives, the teacher takes the position of banisher of fears, giver of encouragement and supporter, provider of inspiration, and ethical actor.

In emotion narratives, the teachers speak of the ethical nature of their work: the teacher cares and helps, feels a calling to his/her job, acts fairly, and is in control of his/her own feelings. S/he inspires pupils to study and creates a safe atmosphere to enable learning. The research data leads to the conclusion that teaching is fundamentally ethical and emotional work. Central to being a teacher is love and a commitment to the well-being of others.