Il disagio professionale degli insegnanti: la precarietà nell'agire

The object of the research is to identify, by means of narrative interviews, which concrete situations the teachers identify as source of uneasiness. The initial research question is “Which are the concrete situations that the teachers identify as uneasiness?” I’ve used fifty narrative interviews, involving teachers belonging to the different scholastic orders, from primary school to secondary school and, for this, professional institutes, technical institutes, high schools. The second research question has been: “Which manners are adopted by the teachers for facing the uneasiness?”. It was identified because the teachers, during the interviews, have highlighted the practices they adopt for overcoming the uneasiness. The direction of sense of the ecological paradigm, assumed as reference, it is explained in the principle of looking for the connecting structure. Here the complex thought is expressed, in the research of relationships, connections that involve a systemic vision of the phenomenon and the activated processes, with the recognition of the interdependences, the crossing from a linear logic to that of the complexity. The research shares with the naturalistic inquiry the principle of avoiding to go on the field with research routes already structured, this fact would involve a manipulation of the context and the phenomenon could not be revealed in its essence. During the analysis process of the protocols of interviews transcription, I have focused the categories (as a set of conceptual tools of the method), with a different degree of generalization, or of conceptual breadth in the description of the phenomenon, so I reached step-by-step a greater degree of conceptual abstraction. The methodological building, through the Grounded Theory, is extending upward, it is an inductive process, from the smaller (conceptual labels or codes), to what it is intermediary (categories or code families), to what is immediately of superior level (macro categories), up to the highest level in the concepting (core category) with a same generative core that takes form from an imperceptible primordial structure, it grows, it returns to his seminal and generative nature. The acting precariousness is the core category that allowed me to connect all the processed conceptual artefacts. The teachers live with a sense of precariousness their own role, they have doubt about the sense of own actions. This is not completely negative, but it is the outcome of to be teachers in a new way, and to be critical protagonists in the evolutions of their own role. There is an uncertainty condition that is not always so easy to be sustained. It belongs to the conjectural character that underlines the new teacher role. A consequence of the precariousness in to act is the absence of consolidated procedure to follow to complete the own professional tasks. Related to this, it is also the fragility caused by the impossibility to discover pre-assigned solutions, and the need of focusing in the research of practicable roads, depending on the available daily situations. The situation of precariousness and uncertainty are tightly coupled, so the role of the teacher that usually is recognized to be strong and absolutely identified, it becomes fragile because the knowledge is not more transferable with absolute certainty.