Paraeducators' Challenges and Expectations: A content analysis of paraeducator's perceptions

Abstract

This study contributes to the qualitative research of paraeducators for special educational classes in mainstream schools. A lot of research is done to investigate the challenges faced by special education teachers working in mainstream school systems, but less effort is placed to explore how paraeducators deal with the challenges they encounter. Paraeducators have a crucial role in supporting learning in inclusive education environment. Thus, it is necessary to learn more also about their challenges particularly in consideration to the solutions to the encountered challenges. Awareness of the challenges and their expectations will allow us to support paraeducators in their job and better prepare future professionals in this field. This qualitative study examined (1) the challenges encountered by paraeducators in relation to their work assist teachers in special education classes in daily teaching situations and (2) their expectations towards their job. The study was conducted in mainstream elementary schools in Finland. Data was collected by semi-structured qualitative interviews with special education paraeducators in Tampere in two different schools. The results reveal that paraeducators had the first difficulty mainly comes from interaction with students, then from their class teachers, and finally from the school administrators. Moreover, the results give insight into their expectations towards their job by which support plans and approaches are considered to enhance the effectiveness of paraeducator employment.