How can we learn to utilize the staff in special schools in a better way? Assistants belong to a professional group within the school system whose mandate is not specifically regulated by government regulations. Despite having a lower education than teachers, assistants are often the group who work with those students that have the greatest learning difficulties. The way in which assistants view their function within the educational system has been described in this study with a hermeneutical approach using interviews from four assistants employed in special schools. The results of this study describe two ways to work as an assistant; one where the assistant feels great participation in all aspects of the educational work and one where the assistant does not feel equally involved, but instead describes a feeling of isolation mostly in regards to teachers. The factors in the outcome of this study that seem important are collegial cooperation, responsibility and sense of community. Both the results of this study and previous research in this area show deficiencies in cooperation between the assistant and the teacher and assistants can get take too much responsibility for teaching. Inadequate information and too little common planning time for assistants and teachers are mentioned as concrete reasons for this. Some assistants feel that there are difficulties concerned with receiving acknowledgement as a profession.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:UPSALLA1/oai:DiVA.org:kau-38773 |
| Date | January 2015 |
| Creators | Settergren, Camilla |
| Publisher | Karlstads universitet |
| Source Sets | DiVA Archive at Upsalla University |
| Language | Swedish |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Student thesis, info:eu-repo/semantics/bachelorThesis, text |
| Format | application/pdf |
| Rights | info:eu-repo/semantics/openAccess |
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