Session Information
Contribution
Description: This educational and sociological study examines schoolteachers' collaboration and collegiality in two schools. There are evidence that both teachers and students benefit from collaboration and teamwork. But still collegiality between teachers has not been given enough attention in the daily work. To some extent collaboration emerges naturally when there are problems but fade away as soon as the situation is solved. Teachers' face-to-face interaction and collaboration are more conceived as contrived and not authentic. The aim is to throw light on the following question: "Are there tensions that reveal hidden patterns in teachers' talk with each other and hold back the collaboration?"
The purpose is to analyze and highlight phenomena in the teachers' interaction that teachers regard as self evident and legitimated, but not approved. Pierre Bourdieu's reflexive sociology and conceptual apparatus provide a framework where the professional talk is investigated. The idea is that teachers represent different subjects and subject traditions with different ways of working. Different subjects and traditions provide teachers with different forms of capital that teachers use when entering the social and collegial world.
Certain forms of capital may be understood as more valuable than others which can cause conflict and frustration in the social relationships. The subject traditions represent different fields and sub disciplines (subfields) that differentiate also regarding ways of looking at knowledge. If the subject traditions differentiate teachers from each other the mutual social practice and the instruction in the schools bring them together. The research illuminates the tension between the connecting social practice and the differentiating cultural capital.
Methodology: Teachers' collaboration and collegiality are examined as face-to-face interactions in two schools. The empirical object for analysis is composed of talk between teachers during meetings on the formal arena. Even if much of the collaboration is done on the informal arena, in coffee room and in the corridors it has not been possible to catch these moments. The collaboration has more been described in interviews of teachers' but what exactly happens in the interactions is still unexplored.
The computer program that is used allows researchers to transcribe and analyse large collections of video and audio data. The analytic software manage the video collections and organise video clips where the theoretical understanding of teachers' interactions and face-to-face become deeper.
Conclusions: The expected outcomes are critical events and turning points that arise both on macro level and micro level in the school world. Especially, the recognition of human potential in teachers' collaboration as a resource is expected to inspire and increase the creativity in the teacher profession. Ethical considerations in video analysis of human interaction are discussed. New methodological instruments and technical tools to analyse and examine data offer a possibility to move forward in the research of educational sociology and social science. The discussions on theory building are expected to be developed forward from post structuralistic to post modernistic theories.
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