Till Örebro universitet

This thesis aims to explain what importance teachers´ leadership is given and how teachers' leadership appears in the parents-teacher conferences. The theoretical frame is lifeworld phenomenology, which means that the world is a social, intersubjective, and historical world where people experience, act, and intertwine in a private and a shared world. The study is inspired by a lifeworld approach and the data was analyzed to consider people's context, their experiences and the challenges involved in leading parent-teacher conferences. The empirical work is based on observations of parent-teacher conferences and interviews with teachers and students. The analyses are made with the support of the life-world phenomenological concepts of hållning, seeing-as and pedagogical tact. The concept hållning has a duality and loses its meaning in translation. Hållning means a bodily approach and is an intertwining between the teacher's attitude and her body posture. All three concepts include verbal and bodily communicative expressions and sensitive and intuitive actions, their meanings will be highlighted and explained. 

The results show that teachers' leadership in parent-teacher conferences includes both preparatory and subsequent work and forms part of the teaching. Leadership both shapes the parent-teacher conference and is shaped in the same and given importance when teachers show consideration for the student, the relationship between teacher and student and the situation, balance challenges with time and sensitive topics, choose to take notes in the parent-teacher conferences in favor of presence in the conversation itself and document afterwards. Teachers' leadership in parent-teacher conferences shape the conversation through teachers' willingness to involve the students, flexibility, and ability to structure. Teachers' leadership in parent-teacher conferences are shaped by teachers' responsiveness, compliance, presence, attention, ability to improvise and playfulness.

The study's life-world phenomenological approach has made it possible to see that the parent-teacher conference requires a didactic knowledge related to the student as a person, to the content and to the structure that surrounds the conversation. This has been made visible in teachers' intuitive actions and bodily expressions as well as unreflected and reflected experiences. The study's starting points have made it possible to broaden the didactic understanding of the teachers' leadership in parent-teacher conferences by highlighting the clear intertwining of these conferences with other teaching.