Intellectual Practicians: An Exploration of Professionalism among Upper Secondary School Teachers with Icelandic Mother Tongue Teachers as a Contextualized Empirical Case

• Main Author: Lea, Kjersti
• Format: Doctoral or Postdoctoral Thesis
• Language: English
• Published: The University of Bergen 2015
• Subjects: praxeologi; profesjonskunnskap; kunnskapsformer; profesjonalitet; VDP::Humaniora: 000::Filosofiske fag: 160; Iceland
• Online Access: https://hdl.handle.net/1956/10286

The study Intellectual practicians explores an educational practice; more particularly that of mother tongue teachers in upper secondary school in Iceland as experienced and described by some of these teachers. The study’s dual research question runs as follows: What conceptions do Icelandic mother tongue teachers in upper secondary school have of the Icelandic subject and what implications do they attribute to the professional management of the subject? What occupational self-concept may be identified in the teachers’ descriptions of their work and their own professional persona? To answer the main questions, supplementary questions are explored. These include questions about what requirements and skills the teachers find imperative in the execution of their profession, about the underlying fundament of their notions, and about what may have shaped these notions. The project thus consists of a descriptive part, in which the teachers’ descriptions and views are accounted for, and an interpretative and theorizing part, which discusses the knowledge, practice, and professional self-understanding which emerge in the teachers’ accounts. In this second part an attempt is moreover made to contextualize the identified conceptions and explore from where they may be derived. Intellectual practicians is a qualitative study. The empirical material consists of the participating teachers’ personal written and oral descriptions of their own practice and occupational self-understanding. The subsequent hermeneutical interpretation of these descriptions is based on Charles Taylor’s hermeneutics. Taylor’s specific version of hermeneutics was chosen as the study’s theoretical fundament because Taylor has taken an interest in interpretation of social action and interaction. The Taylorian approach is supported by Pierre Bourdieu’s sociological empiricist point of view, particularly as this is expressed in his theory of practice. The study’s main findings and the interpretation of them are presented in the chapters “Teaching as a ...