Student-centeredness in the pressures of everyday work

Finnish vocational teachers' conceptions of the positive and negative aspects of their work

Authors

• Antti Maunu

DOI: https://doi.org/10.33350/ka.76271

Keywords:

organizational change, qualitative research, reform of vocational education, teaching, vocational education and training

Abstract

In the article, I analyze 44 vocational teachers' and student welfare service professionals' experiences of their everyday work and its positive and negative aspects. I relate the results to the ongoing and previous reforms of Finnish vocational upper secondary education. According to the analysis, vocational education professionals have fairly well followed the principles of customer-based and competence-based teaching from the early days of the reform. By contrast, there are great challenges in the organization of these professionals' everyday working conditions which makes it often difficult to work with customer-students in an appropriate manner. Teachers' and other professionals' work processes are often disjointed and change quickly according to changing administrative and economic factors. Thus, the main question in the implementation of the reform is the organization of the professionals' everyday work and work processes. This is perceived also in the evaluation of previous educational reforms. In light of the article, a promising means for such a reorganization would be a team-based organization of vocational teaching. However, this requires support for teachers from vocational education organizations.