Gymnasiebibliotekariens yrkesroll En fenomenografisk undersökning.

Abstract

Although school librarians have an important role to play in high schools helping teachers and students during their education, Swedish school librarians are often considered to end up left out by teachers and head principals due to school librarians vague and unclear professional role in the school. The aim of this thesis is to attempt to study school librarians own apprehensions of their particular professional role in a high school context, and how their professional role is believed to be apprehended by teachers and head principals. The results are based on interviews made with eight school librarians working in different high school libraries in Gothenburg during April 2002. By using phenomenographic method various existing apprehensions of the specific phenomena that the professional role of the school librarian constitutes of are made clear. The aim of the method is not to study what the profession constitutes of, but rather how it is apprehended by the school librarians themselves. An exhaustive description of existing studies in this particular field of interest is given and is to be considered to be a background to which this thesis results are to be seen. The results themselves reveal several different apprehensions of the professional role of the school librarian. Some apprehensions do school librarians have in common with each other, while some apprehensions are individual to its character. This thesis does not make any attempt to analyse or relate the forthcoming results to other studies in this area. It merely presents the perceived apprehensions, as they were unravelled in the interviews.