Abstract:

Teachers are of key importance in education, ensuring its effectiveness. Their work is basically determined by their knowledge and skills, their professionalism and motivation. Nowadays, in the 21st century, the presence of women in education keeps increasing significantly. The feminisation of education has both positive and negative effects on various institutions and their educational processes taking place there. This is mostly influenced by the field’s social esteem, which depends on teachers’ sense of vocation, their personality, the effects of their training, and their existing and incomplete competencies.

In this article, we’ll discuss Hungarian professionalisation and the feminisation of the teaching profession with a brief historical overview up to the present day. Several foreign and Hungarian works, monographs, study volumes, collections of excerpts and studies have been published on the subject in recent years. Our article is based on the scientific writings and research of József Kiss, István Mészáros, Béla Pukánszky, András Németh, Katalin Kéri, Éva Thun, Regina Cortina, Sonsoles San Román, Christine Skelton, Eileen M. Byrne and Anna Tokárová. In addition, we examined the common difficulties in the teaching profession that greatly influence current educational processes, based on the monograph Szeretettel és szigorral (2006) by Éva Szabó and Mi, a pedagógusok (2006) by Vera Kósáné Ormai and Annabella Horányi.

In our research, relying on theory, we look for problems and difficulties arising in current educational processes, and the female teachers’ reactions to them. During the research, using an exploratory method, we collected information about the perception of the teaching career, and current characteristics and difficulties among Hungarian-speaking primary school teachers in Slovakia and Hungary by means of a questionnaire. We confirmed and supplemented the obtained data with three interviews. The research focuses on examining how female teachers can cope in today’s educational environment, as well as how they perceive the teaching career and its status.

Keywords:

Professionalisation, feminisation of teaching career, questionnaire research, teaching career image.