מאפייני תפיסת הייעוד של עובדי הוראה בישראל

The characterization of occupational decision-making processes by 24 teaching professional is the topic of the present qualitative study. The underlying assumptions were adopted from the Meaning of Work discipline, where work is perceived as a calling. The analysis of the semi-structured interviews used to gather the career stories of teaching professionals, was guided by three principles: adopting a contextual approach to narrative analysis, hermeneutic analysis, and writing as a research method. The stories reveal three characteristics of the perception of calling: First, the participants' perception of calling is deterministic; second, it contains two inseparable components – orientation toward others and a sense of meaningfulness; third, the perception of calling is generic, and is not necessarily related to teaching. The perception of calling revealed in this study differs from those in the literature in three constructs – it is hybrid, lacks boundaries, and expresses a dependence between the sense of meaningfulness and orientation toward others.