Pedagogika Szkoły Wyższej

In the article the Author presents a thesis that a significant part of the dilemmas of an academic teacher – didactician are related to experiencing various types of ambivalence and tensions involved in this professional role. She addresses the category of ambivalence, considers its usefulness in the reflection upon the professional role, and presents two major areas in which tensions are experienced. Accordingly, she describes ambivalence as a tension caused by finding oneself in the field of opposing expectations and normative requirements concerning the professional role, established by the employer and finding their manifestation e.g. in the inconsistency of set tasks and the system of evaluation and promotion of an employee, that is, ambivalence inscribed in the triad of being a scientist, didactician and a certain type of manager all at the same time. Another presented area concerns the role ambivalence understood as a tension resulting from diversity and self-contradictory nature of a didactic role of an academic teacher, whose task is often to combine the roles of a teaching expert giving canonical lectures, a workshop trainer creating self-learning possibilities for students, an animator of shared experiences, or an empathic tutor supporting an individual path of development of a given person. Each of those roles requires the activation of different personal resources, different educational tools and different types of relations with students.