Att mötas på folkhögskola : en studie om folkhögskollärares pedagogiska hållning

Abstract

This thesis explores pedagogical practices and everyday learning at a folk high school by looking at how encounters between teachers and course participants appear in the pedagogical practice. It also explores how the relational dimension of these encounters can be understood and what significance the encounters have in teachers' practice. For this purpose, the study draws on a folk high school's craft courses where encounters are made visible and described from a teacher perspective.Drawing on empirical data from ethnographic field studies including recorded interviews, daily conversations, and school documents, and thereby establishing a lifeworld phenomenological perspective, the study shows a pedagogical approach characterised by a firm belief in encounters as a pedagogical point of departure for teaching and learning. The strong belief in encounters is characterised by the understanding of teaching as a process with relational and existential dimensions. This pedagogical approach is more specifically illustrated by the teachers' openness, sensitivity, and attention to the lifeworld of the participants, and by responsively following, interplaying, and challenging participants in these encounters.The lifeworld phenomenological concept the lived body shows the significance of bodily presence as teachers' and participants' shared experiences and meaning making in encounters become a guiding principle in teaching. In this process teachers' experience of their own lived body and of the participants' lived bodies turns out to be of great importance for the didactic choices and actions that are made. Bodily presence means listening to and perceiving another human being in a becoming process, which enables a joint constitution of meaning that is not given in advance but rather arises within the encounters. Encounters therefore become a central space for joint meaning-making which calls for openness of teachers to everything that is taking place between teacher and participants. Since teaching is perceived as a process in which the goal for participants' learning can be developing, it demands a special presence of the teachers. This presence is essential to be able to decide the rhythm and direction together with the participants, based on what seems essential in their mutual encounter.