Regimes of Teacher Beliefs from a Comparative and International Perspective

Abstract

Amidst a worldwide concern with teacher quality, recent teacher reforms often focus on how to certify teachers, how to evaluate teachers, how to recruit the best and brightest people to be teachers, and how to fire bad teachers. The political discourse of these policy reforms oftentimes depicts teachers as largely inactive transmitters of knowledge and does not recognize the agency they have in affecting standards. Yet, such a narrow framework may suppress teacher pedagogy, practices, and also teacher beliefs. In this chapter, we seek to understand the extent that two types of math teacher beliefs – traditional and constructivist orientations – are related to national cultural factors. In doing so, we test both “culturist” and “neo-institutional” hypotheses by observing how those beliefs vary across different nations.

Citation

Fraser, P. and Ikoma, S. (2015), "Regimes of Teacher Beliefs from a Comparative and International Perspective", Promoting and Sustaining a Quality Teacher Workforce (International Perspectives on Education and Society, Vol. 27), Emerald Group Publishing Limited, Leeds, pp. 111-144. https://doi.org/10.1108/S1479-367920140000027007