THE USE OF THE SEMANTIC FIELDS ANALYSIS IN “SCHOOL MEMOY” RESEARCH

Abstract

The article discusses the issues concerning the teaching profession. Referring to the results of my research, I will try to depict the memory image of a teacher experienced by the students. This research can be qualified as a biographical one. The theoretical frames are madę by the assumptions of interactionism and phenomenology. Taking into consideration the aim of this research and the fact that I have studied selected aspects of social life, it is a topie related biography. During the research I tried to establish how the graduates construe social reality and what sense they assign to the teachers activities.
I ran the research in 2004, and it covered 87 graduates - in fact three generations of them. To collect the data I used the narrative enąuiry. I analyzed the materiał I collected with the use of method of the semantic fields created out of the thematic and notional words interplay. Lan- guage is one of the symbols creating society. Semantic field is the result of social reality interpretation by the individual. It collects the current and past life experiences. The semantic fields reveal the changes in the interpretation of the social reality by the past and current students. The research allows noticing the differences in perceiving and evaluating the work of teachers by the generations of graduates. The oldest generation of graduates recorded a memory picture of the teacher as a tutor and leader, whereas younger and the youngest generations evaluate teachers through their teaching function.
This analysis also shows that it is vital to introduce changes into the professional training.