Teachers’ vocational fit - implications for the teacher-student relationship from the perspective of hermeneutic pedagogy

Abstract

The starting point and at the same time the axis of the considerations presented in the article was the introduction of the teacher-student relationship - the impulse to undertake them was the assumptions of hermeneutic pedagogy, whose specific branch, focused on the process of understanding the senses and meanings of what happens between the student and the educator, was referenced to this key relationship for the school microsystem. Then, in reference to the category of „meeting” of the teacher and the student, the issue of vocational fit was presented, which was shown from the point of view of the psychological (personalistic) approach in pedeutology, taking into account the specific catalog of duties of the older of the participants of this dyad in relation to the younger of them – it was emphasized that only a teacher optimally suited to the profession will be able to create such conditions for his students, that will enable them to achieve self-knowledge and form a cultural personality in terms of hermeneutic (humanistic) pedagogy. In the next part of the article, the vocational fit of teachers was shown in reference to John L. Holland’s Theory of Career Choice (the Theory of Vocational Personality) and the Five Factor Theory of Personality of Paul T. Costa and Robert R. McCrae - it also quoted the results of empirical analyzes relating to this issue, and in reference to assumptions of hermeneutic pedagogy, an attempt was made to interpret them in a different way than before, taking into account the look at the problem from a new perspective.