A QUALITATIVE ANALYSIS OF THE ATTITUDES OF UNIVERSITY STUDENTS TO UNIVERSITY TEACHERS

In the life of students, the University represents a significant institution that prepares them for their future career. The behavior of teachers is under constant ‘supervision’; accepting the teacher’s authority changes with the age and is shaped in a mutual interaction (student-teacher; teacher-student). This relationship is then one of the major factors that may affect the student’s attitude to education and future profession. The quality of the teacher-student relationship is crucial to education, which should be a continuous process. The importance of this relationship cannot be underestimated in university, where pre-service teachers prepare for educating the next generations of children. The aim of the present research is to investigate the attitudes of university students to university teachers by means of an analysis of open-ended statements. The research design is the concurrent nested (embedded) strategy. The qualitative analysis of the data is based on open axial coding in the embedded theory. The data are collected concurrently in terms of quality and quantity; however, during their analysis one set of data is given priority. In our case, the dominant data is the qualitative data (obtained by means of a deep analysis of written statements), while the quantitative data (numbers) were of a complementary nature. The research sample consists of students of the Faculty of Education, Palacký University in Olomouc. The sample includes a total of 178 respondents, of whom 142 are women and 26 are men. The results suggest that the respondents do care about the quality of the teacher-student relationship. The qualities that are appreciated by students in university teachers include helpfulness and serenity. Negative qualities include lack of interest, superiority, and arrogance.