| dc.description.abstract | In recent years, co-operation between teachers belonging to different teaching
traditions or ”cultures”, has become common in Sweden, particularly within
the first years of primary school, where teachers from a pre-school tradition
(pre-school teachers, recreational pedagogues) work alongside primary school
teachers. The thesis explores the relation between two different yet related professional
cultures, teachers and recreational pedagogues, in their collaborative
work in the Swedish primary school. It is an ethnographic case study of development
of collaboration between the two teaching traditions, in two schools
with somewhat different organisational structure. The emphasis is on the intersection
between these two professions and their two professional cultures.
The two categories of teachers have different conceptions of their professional
identity, depending on which tradition they belong to. The primary
school teacher focuses her function as a mediator in children’s learning, while
the pedagogue, from the pre-school tradition, sees herself mainly as a model for
the child. Teachers and recreational pedagogues also build and shape the physical
and mental environment for their work with the children from different perspectives.
These are summarised in the metaphors of “school as a work place”
and “recreational centre as a home”. These differences in turn are mirrored in
different strategies in collaborative situations, strategies that sometimes give rise
to misunderstandings and overt or covert conflicts between the two groups,
since the underlying conceptions of the professional identities are not brought to
the surface.
The teachers’ professional culture is here described as a culture with relatively
strong classification and framing. A line of indicators point in the same
direction in relation to their professional history. Correspondingly we can discern
parallels between the weaker classification and framing that characterises the
professional culture of the pedagogues and factors in the historical background
and development of their professional practice. | en |
