Author(s): Małgorzata Zalewska-Bujak / Language(s): Polish
The monograph constitutes an attempt at providing a teacher’s perspective on their work environment. Due to my interest in identifying how – and where – teachers see themselves within the school environment, I decided to provide them with an opportunity to speak for themselves and, through personal interviews, study the everyday challenges of their profession. The possibility to access first‑hand accounts of the professional experiences of teachers has allowed me to gain deeper insight into their work environment. Moreover, it has allowed me to look as if through their eyes at both the people and situations they encounter, and their own initiatives, as well as the standards according to which they operate. In addition, it has enabled me to recognise the meanings which they assign to everyday occurrences, processes and structures of their professional life.On the other hand, Pierre Bourdieu’s theories shed a different light on the study of the teacher’s place in the school life. Those theories, in turn, serve as the methodological basis forthe analysis of the teachers’ experiences. The application of that theoretical framework, however, differs from its use in quantitative research projects and does not consist in empirical verification of the assumed theoretical model. Instead, chosen concepts derived from Bourdieu’s conceptual apparatus allowed me to describe and interpret the meanings which teachers assign to their experiences in the school environment.In the opening part of the book, I present the macrosocial conditions regarding the teachingprofession, including both the national tendencies to politicise the school environment, aswell as the global trends manifesting in – often covert – attempts at construing it as a sphereof neoliberal influence. Further, I introduce the theoretical background utilised in order to interpret the results of the study, and elaborate on selected Polish research studies on the nature of pedagogy, using Bourdieu’s theories.Moreover, the monograph includes an overview of my own methodological perspectiveon my research concerning teachers in the school environment. This includes: a discussionregarding the subject of the study and my interpretative stance; an outline of aims and selected problem areas; an overview of data gathering, including interview procedures; a characteristic of the research subjects; and, finally, an overview of the applied strategies for working with the empirical research material and the use of analytical tools.In the following parts of the book, I analyse and interpret my research results, which includes:1) a description of the habitus revealed by the teachers, showing the way in which theyinform the teacher’s perception and everyday professional functioning; 2) a reading of the school as a place of reproduction and symbolic violation, resulting from the factual inequality among the students maintained under the guise of official and formal equality, as well as revealing certain mechanisms of reproduction functioning in the school environment, which – according to Bourdieu – result in the capital following the capital, allowing the social structure to remain unchallenged; 3) a discussion of the symbolic violence of the school environment (owing to the description of sources cited by the teachers and the forms of symbolic violation which emerge in the school environment); 4) a description of the teachers’ strategies of surviving in the school environment – since it appears that the subjects engaged in play make efforts designed to maintain the subjects’ positions within the environment, using strategies which, in their understanding, will enable them to retain their status. The subjects engage in those actions according to their habitus, which allow them to find their place within the school structures and enable them to utilise generally acknowledged practices and procedures in the process of developing strategies.
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