Sotiria Varis
| Contact search available for JYU staff members. ORCID link: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-7796-2772 |
Active JYU affiliations
- Department of Teacher Education, Postdoctoral Researcher
Research interests
Despite a lack of explicit CLIL policy, CLIL is still popular in Finland with many schools implementing it, although its vision may be blurry for teachers and the impending challenges daunting. The doctoral dissertation focuses on challenges CLIL teachers in Finland face in light of professional agency and identity as well as emotions. By examining the situation in Finnish schools using CLIL through the teachers’ viewpoint, this study aspires to strengthen CLIL teachers’ voice and draw attention to the educational implications of how agency is experienced and enacted as a dynamic concept bound to three principal parameters, namely pedagogical understanding, collegial relationships and the contextual, socio-cultural situations. Teachers’ professional identity is seen as teachers’ inner regulatory and interpretive systems operating in relation to biographical, contextual and sociocultural factors. The results of this study may give rise to new questions and enhance CLIL teachers’ sense of community. Seen within a framework comprising school culture and socio-cultural factors, teacher agency in primary education and CLIL settings may help educators adjust their teaching, managerial and motivational practices as well as pursue courses of action conducive to empowerment and agency through such practices and their work environment. In effect, it may cause CLIL educators to be more reflective and proficient, while it may shed light on existing needs that may later inform future research, teaching performance and school leadership. It may also give the initiative for political reform for CLIL in Finnish education in order to ease teachers’ day-to-day struggle in the CLIL classroom and aid them in their providing students with a broader learning experience at school. Finally, a better understanding of the Finnish context could help advance development in other CLIL contexts and offer insight relevant to the new curriculum that is to be introduced in the near future.
