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A Case of a Beginning Teacher in the Caucasus
Šimáková Dosoudilová, Anna ; MALANÍKOVÁ, Hana (advisor) ; CHRZ, Vladimír (referee)
The diploma thesis A Case of a Beginning Teacher in the Caucasus: authorial approach in a school system seeks to depict and reflect on teacher´ s first year at work. The case study draws on author´s job experience at an international school in Tbilisi, Republic of Georgia. Since this job experience taught the author a lesson, she wants to gain a deeper insight into her own pedagogical activity as well as to examine the options how to work creatively and originally within a limitating school system.
The first part of the thesis operates experimentally with a biographical narrative method – the period in a beginning teacher position is being described in a novel way, using stylized literary diary entries as well as authentic ones, supplemented by personal correspondence from that time.
The second part of the paper reflects on the narrated experience and analyzes it with the help of pedagogical and psychological literature. With respect to author´s intended future in educational sphere, she addresses topics which require a closer examination (nonviolent communication, consistency, freedom and order in a class and in relationships, a need to remain present and connected) and she searches for sources that could serve as an inspiration for her further educational activities. Method of nonviolent communication as well as principles of unschooling and dialogical acting with the inner partner are presented as the main inspirational impulses. Combining those together with the reflection of the teaching and examples from the school, a sort of beginning teacher´s handbook is being composed, to be used as a good practice in author´s future teaching.
Finally, the whole story is being looked at through the narrative analysis which reveals signs corresponding to a genre of Bildungsroman. Furthermore, the story seems to be a story of the quest; the quest for meaning of what author does, the quest for her adult identity, for her place in the society and for the approach to educational institutions and their students. At that point, the thesis comes to the need of creating school system without hierarchy, which would rather be a community of equal individuals where relationships are not built on power principle, on command and prohibition, but they stem from highly developed empathy.
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