Yrkeskulturer i möte : läraren, fritidspedagogen och samverkan

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.