Finnish School Teachers Research Articles

Drammatic breaks: Break recovery experiences as mediators between job demands and affect in the afternoon and evening.

The present study focused on within-workday recovery, which has received less scholarly attention than has recovery outside work. We examined six break recovery experiences (detachment, relaxation, autonomy, mastery, meaning and affiliation) as possible mediators between daily emotional job demands, positive and negative affect both in the afternoon and in the evening. We conducted a one-work week diary study (N=107) among Finnish schoolteachers with three daily measurements per workday. Most participants (88%) were women, and the average age was 50 years. The data were analysed with multilevel path modelling. Regarding daily afternoon affect, both low break detachment and low break meaning mediated the relationship between high daily emotional demands and low afternoon positive affect and high afternoon negative affect. Regarding daily evening affect, only low break meaning mediated the relationship between high daily emotional demands and low evening positive affect. In addition, afternoon positive and negative affect did mediate the relationships between break detachment and meaning and positive and negative evening affect. Our findings offer new insights into the interplay of daily job demands, break recovery experiences and affective well-being. Despite detachment, meaning, which has received limited research attention as a recovery experience, seems to play an important role in within-workday recovery. Our study also suggests that successful break recovery can benefit employees' affective well-being in the evening.

Pride in Education: A Narrative Study of Five Finnish Schoolteachers

This narrative inquiry explores how Finnish schoolteachers perceived the emotion of pride as a feature of teaching and learning. The study consists of face-to-face interviews with Finnish schoolteachers between 30 and 62 years of age. The results reveal perceptions of teaching and learning that are shaped by a culture of social equality, modesty, group achievement, and tenacity, that is, Sisu. Although the teachers understand achievement pride as a positive feature of learning, in association with cultural norms and values, pride is not a significant emotional response to promote in the classroom. The results are important for understanding how teachers exploit larger cultural values to judge the worth of particular emotions in the classroom.

Voice Disorders are Associated With Stress Among Teachers: A Cross-Sectional Study in Finland

Voice disorders are considered to be more common among teachers than other occupations. However, epidemiological data are scarce and only a few researchers have studied stress as a risk factor in voice disorders in teachers. This paper presents data from a study on Finnish school teachers which investigated the prevalence of voice disorders and evaluated the risk factors for voice disorders, especially stress. A cross-sectional study was conducted among primary and secondary education teachers across Finland. Voice disorders were assessed with a seven-item voice questionnaire and stress at work was measured with a validated single-item question. The prevalence of voice disorders over the 12-month period was 54% in the sample of 1198 primary and secondary education teachers in Finland. Of the teachers, 81% were female, and they suffered more voice disorders than the males. Stress was the most significant explanatory variable with a 3.6-fold risk as regards voice disorders. The association between voice disorders and stress was even stronger than that of asthma, asthma medication, and allergic rhinitis, which are known to cause serious risks for voice disorders in general. Our results hypothesize that stress may be a multi-dimensional problem associated with various risk factors and result in an even more urgent risk of voice disorders in teachers than estimated. Longitudinal research is needed to investigate the causality between voice disorders and stress among teachers. In addition, it is recommended that in the occupational health care of teachers' consideration should be given to the fact that voice disorders and stress may have a multi-dimensional association.

Emotional labour in a school of individuals

The study examines Finnish discussions on student-centred school culture and teachers’ emotional labour from a sociological and historical perspective. It employs a thematic analysis of articles published in a Finnish teachers’ professional magazine from 1979 to 2011. In interpreting the data, the study draws from emotional labour research and Wouters’s studies on permissive culture. The results show that student-centred ideals retained their dominant position in Finnish schoolteachers’ professional discussions throughout the research period. However, the emotional stress involved in student-centred teaching evoked considerable criticism from teachers. Attitudes varied regarding the solutions to the problem of teacher stress: some of these solutions emphasised improving teachers’ emotional competence, whereas others centred on decreasing the amount of emotional labour in teachers’ work. The study also indicates the importance of teachers’ emotional labour in enabling students’ individual freedom at school.

School Detention in Finland : A Pilot Study

Although detention is one of the most popular methods of punishment in schools, it is being met with increasing criticism as an educational intervention. Few studies have explored its use to date; therefore, the present pilot study was planned to survey the popularity of detention. By analyzing a representative sample of comprehensive school teachers (N = 2,276) in Finland at grade levels 1-9, it was found that 30% of Finnish school teachers regularly use this punishment. Differences in use were observed across gender, age, and teacher category. These results provide a baseline against which future follow-up studies can be compared. Article visualizations:

When does the educational use of ICT become a source of technostress for Finnish teachers?

The accelerating digitalization of society has resulted in a demand to speed-up the implementation of ICT in teaching, and changes in curriculum policies reflect this development. However, the demand to increase the educational use of ICT may also cause stress. The aim of the current study was to explore how demographics are associated with technostress and which factors predict it in Finnish school teachers. The data was collected with the OPEKA online self‑evaluation questionnaire tool. The sample consisted of 2,741 teachers. The results indicated that subject teachers were more “technostressed” than class teachers, female teachers were more stressed than males, and teachers with 16–30 years of working experience were more stressed than teachers with 0–15 years of experience. The key predictors of the technostress were ICT competence, the concordance of the educational use of ICT with the teaching style, school support, and attitudes to the educational use of ICT. High ICT competence, high concordance of ICT with the teaching style, high levels of school support, and positive attitudes to ICT were associated with low levels of technostress. The results are discussed in the light of previous findings, and the practical implications and the need for future studies are explored.

From authority figure to emotion worker: attitudes towards school discipline in Finnish schoolteachers’ journals from the 1950s to the 1980s

The article discusses the change in attitudes towards school discipline in Finnish schoolteachers’ professional journals from the late 1950s to the early 1980s. In explaining this change, the article draws from the studies of Cas Wouters and Arlie Hochschild. At the beginning of the studied period, the discussions in the schoolteachers’ professional journals were dominated by conservative views, which promoted authoritarian solutions to schools’ discipline-related problems. Over the next decades, however, these discussions came to be dominated by progressive views, which placed great value on the individual needs and rights of children. This emphasised the nature of teaching as a form of emotional labour, and it also raised discussion on how teachers could better adapt themselves to the emotional demands of the new democratic school culture.

Counter from the cathedra: Democratic School Workers Association redefining teachers’ political agency in Finland 1973–1989

Finnish school teachers are unlike their colleagues in many countries, for their ethos and skills have traditionally formed the basis for a profession which has been very loyal to the state and to the changing educational ideologies of the government. Critical historical periods of wars and social revolutions have, however, produced – to a small degree – different kinds of tendencies. This article discusses the political agency of comprehensive and upper secondary school teachers by looking at a particular point of rupture in the Finnish “master narrative” of a neutral and impartial teacher image. As an example of a counter-narrative, the paper presents a small leftist teacher association called the Democratic School Workers Association (Demko) which existed between 1973 and 1989. Demko’s manifesto texts are analysed with the help of A.J. Greimas’ actantial model in order to find the possible kind of political agency that is constructed for teachers. The analysis shows a major change between the 1970s and 1980s. The early Demko narrative draws from the vocabulary of the neo-leftist student movement, inviting progressive teachers to join the “common struggle”. Demko aims at lobbying the more established political actors, whereas individual agency is shackled by the ideals of monolithicity and unanimity. In the 1980s, along with the fading of societal radicalism, Demko’s narrative evolves into a more polyphonic space for identity debates. Political agency is transferred from the collective to individuals who are supposed to critically reflect Demkoian ideals against their everyday praxis. All in all, Demkoian narrative is interpreted as having enriched the gamut of “possible discourses” in the era of the early Finnish comprehensive school. With its distinctively socio-political orientation, Demko tested the boundaries of the political agency of Finnish teachers.

Rural schoolteachers and the pressures of community life: local and cosmopolitan coping strategies in mid-twentieth-century Finland

This article discusses rural schoolteachers’ relationships with local village communities in mid-twentieth-century Finland. At the time, Finnish rural teachers were typically very public figures in their local community. To deal with the pressures of their position, teachers resorted to coping strategies which the authors name ‘local’ and ‘cosmopolitan’ after Robert K. Merton’s well-known categories. The local strategy required that teachers adapt themselves to the social demands of community life, whereas the cosmopolitan strategy was manifested in the teachers’ efforts to distance themselves from the local community, reflecting the increasing professionalisation of Finnish schoolteachers as well as a general social transition in which traditional community ties were gradually replaced by modern individualism.

“Not Everyone is Cut Out to be the Entrepreneur Type”: How Finnish School Teachers Construct the Meaning of Entrepreneurship Education and the Related Abilities of the Pupils

The present study set out to explore how a group of Finnish school teachers constructs the meaning of entrepreneurship education and produces related characterizations of the abilities of the pupils in their interviews. In their discussions, the teachers deployed the discourses of ‘internal entrepreneurship’ and ‘external entrepreneurship’. Internal entrepreneurship was associated with the pupils' responsible attitude to (school) work; it was represented as an ideal subjectivity for all and accepted as the natural aim of schooling. The promotion of external entrepreneurship, however, was seen to be beyond the aims of basic education. Within the discourse of external entrepreneurship, the teachers explicated the differences between the pupils' abilities; they saw potential for entrepreneurship particularly in those boys who are not academically accomplished but are socially talented, creative, easygoing and risk-taking or competent at practical things. High-performing students, especially girls, were not included in the characterizations of “the entrepreneur type of pupil”.

Computer-based molecular modelling: Finnish school teachers’ experiences and views

Modern computer-based molecular modelling opens up new possibilities for chemistry teaching at different levels. This article presents a case study seeking insight into Finnish school teachers’ use of computer-based molecular modelling in teaching chemistry, into the different working and teaching methods used, and their opinions about necessary support. The study suggests that most of the teachers studied need personally to discover the benefits of molecular modelling in their own work that illustrate on a practical level how molecular modelling can provide added value for teaching and understanding school chemistry. Teachers state that they need more pedagogical and technical training in molecular modelling so they can use it more and effectively in their own teaching. Furthermore, there is a need for easily adaptable learning and teaching materials to be made available to teachers in their domestic teaching language.