Social representations of teachership based on students’ and teachers’ drawings of a typical teacher

Abstract

This study examines social representations of teachership based on students' and teachers' drawings. Fifty-nine students and thirty-nine teachers in upper-secondary education in Finland participated in the research, drawing a picture of a typical teacher and commenting on their drawings verbally. The study focuses on what kinds of social representations of teachership the drawings suggest and how teachers' and students' social representations relate to each other and to Finnish education policy. The data were analyzed by content analysis. This study shows that teachers' and students' social representations of teachership differ from each other and also deviate from Finnish education policy to some extent. Furthermore, the results suggest that teachers do not pay sufficient attention to their visual nonverbal behavior, which might contribute to the formation of unfavorable social representations of teachers among students, influencing interaction and learning negatively.

Sociocultural Dynamics Of The “Education” Concept In Social Representations Of Russian People

“…Their ideas about education are the subject of our study. The comparison of the results will be carried out with modern studies (Dobryakova, 2018;Martikainen, 2019;Pirttilä-Backma et al, 2017;Tolstykh, 2019).…”

Pre-service subject teachers’ personal teacher characterisations after the pedagogical studies

“…The students have their own personalised experiences of schools, teachers and teacher-student relationship that inevitable play a role in their teacher characterisations. Embedded in the personalised experiences students lean also on different social representations (Martikainen 2019), cultural ideals (Akkerman and Meijer 2011) and cultural models (Gee 2010) of teachers and teaching that are shared.…”

“…In his study based on teachers' and students' drawings, Martikainen (2019) explored social representations of teachership. Building on the ideas of Moscovici (2001) Martikainen (2019) argues that teachers and students lean on social representations which are determined by the values and norms of the community developed over a long period of time. These socially constructed and culturally shared conceptions of teachership are often unconscious and therefore hardly ever questioned (Gee 2000).…”

“…These socially constructed and culturally shared conceptions of teachership are often unconscious and therefore hardly ever questioned (Gee 2000). Martikainen (2019) found out that teachers' and students' social representations differed partly from each other. Students' drawings represented three teacher types: formal and authoritarian, bored and indifferent as well as friendly and communicative teacher.…”

“…Lipponen and Kumpulainen 2011;Tynjälä et al 2016), such as narrow power distance and equality between students and teachers, whereas students' representations leaned also on more traditional values, such as power and emotional distance between students and teachers (Martikainen 2019). This finding may indicate a kind of a transition or hybrid space where traditional and current ideals on learning and teaching are in a state of flux (Arvaja and Sarja 2020) as (traditional) social representations are deeply rooted in the school culture and laborious to change (Martikainen 2019). In addition, in practice, teaching is not always as studentcentred as official educational policy suggests (Martikainen 2019).…”