The doctoral dissertation of Tarja Turtiainen, MHSc, describes the perceptions of social and health care teachers’ approaches to teaching and the conditions of work, that is, teaching environment and the educational leadership in social and health care departments, in universities of applied sciences. In addition, the dissertation aims to explain the relations between the perceptions and the background variables as well as between the conditions of work and approaches to teaching.
The questionnaire was sent to 1 113 social and health care teachers in the spring of 2013. The response rate was 41,3 % (n=439). The quantitative data analysis employed descriptive methods, Mann–Whitney U -test to detect differences between two groups, and ANOVA or Kruskal–Wallis -test to detect differences between more than two groups. The qualitative data was analysed with inductive content analysis. The relations between the conditions of work and approaches to teaching were explained with a path analysis.
The social and health care teachers´ approach to teaching was strongly orientated to a learning-focused approach. The learning-focused approach to teaching was characteristic of the female teachers and those whose work included a lot of co-operation with working life and administrative tasks related to teaching and continuous professional development. Furthermore, the pedagogics of the learning-focused approach to teaching was described especially in the qualitative data: the pedagogical bases, learning environments for knowledge construction and engagement as well as working life orientation. A content-focused approach to teaching was characteristic of the teachers aged 48 years or less, part-time teachers, teachers with less than five years of work experience, teachers teaching basic studies and teachers engaging in little co-operation with working life.
The conditions of the teachers' work were studied from the point of view of the teaching environment and the educational leadership in the social and health care departments. The challenges in the teaching environment were connected to learning and teaching, control of the work and the learning environments. Furthermore, functional learning environments were described. Commitment to learning was characteristic of the principal teachers, teachers who taught in master or advanced professional studies, and when the teachers had co-operation tasks with working life, pursued continuous professional development and when the mean value of primary applicant number in the degree programme was between 3 and 8.9. The teaching work was under the teachers' control especially among the teachers who had plenty of co-operation with working life. Both change in the teachers´ work and time management as well as opportunities for the planning and implementation of teaching functioned well among the teachers whose work included continuous professional development. The context of the educational leadership in the social and health care departments was constantly changing. Educational leadership turned out to be both problematic and successful management and leadership. The leaders' strength was fair leadership. Characteristic of transformational and collaborative leadership was to support the continuous professional development of the teachers. There was a connection between educational leadership, the conditions of teaching and approaches to teaching.
A teacher’s working hours should include a balance of different tasks of teachers’ work and continuous professional development to support a learning-focused approach and control of the teaching environment. One should invest in supporting the teachers’ own continuous professional development and the new teachers' orientation.
The doctoral dissertation of Tarja Turtiainen, Master of Health Sciences, entitled Social and healthcare teachers' approaches to teaching and conditions of work in universities of applied sciences, will be examined at the Faculty of Health Sciences. The Opponent in the public examination will be Professor Elina Haavisto of the University of Turku, and the Custos will be Professor Hannele Turunen of the University of Eastern Finland. The public examination will be held online in Finnish on 4 December 2020.
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