Lärares raster : innehåll i mellanrum

Sammanfattning: This study, in which a Grounded Theory approach is used, attempts to determine what happens during teachers’ recess periods and the effect these interspaces might have on the everyday work of teachers. The aim is to generate a concrete theory out of observations and interviews, simultaneously showing what’s going on in the field and taking into account the main concerns of those acting there.The findings show that teachers appear to have lost the sense of interspaces in their working day. A public sphere has encroached on their recess periods and they seem to be acting in the public eye everywhere, almost constantly accessible to all kinds of interactions. The domains that affect this state of interaction alertness are the ambition to display in a public sphere and the delimitation of professional content. A working situation without interspaces leads, at the same time, to teachers that neither have the possibility of controlling the existence and borders of their public appearance, that is – the professional content – , nor the possibility of creating personal interspaces, where the necessary conditions for forming and upholding the official façade, as well as the team, are at hand. In this scenario everything becomes professional content and nothing can be weeded out, everything can be judged and scrutinized, and everybody becomes everybody else’s audience.Formal theory is integrated as comparative data, mainly Asplund’s (1987) theory of abstract sociality as the core of burnout, and Goffman’s (1959) theory of social interaction.The lost and genuine interspaces can be understood as the back regions Goffman describes, and mastering them plays a decisive role in experiencing control over the working situation as a whole.In their efforts to handle the public spheres invasion of the recess periods, the teachers’ attempt to regain control over the back regions by demarcating and recreating recess situations of a more personal nature. Without the conditions of genuine interspaces there is no possibility to dissociate oneself from, define or delimit, a professional content, and without defining content there is no possibility to find or create these interspaces where cultures and creativity are rooted and nourished.