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1 – 10 of 24Josephine G. Schuman and Dan Reynolds
Research has documented how white teachers often fall short of their anti-racist intentions. However, much of this research is done with preservice teachers or teachers across…
Abstract
Purpose
Research has documented how white teachers often fall short of their anti-racist intentions. However, much of this research is done with preservice teachers or teachers across disciplines. The authors investigate stories in which white English teachers who teach substantial proportions of black students and who self-reported anti-racist goals nevertheless fell short of those goals. The purpose of the study is to understand the tensions between racial liberalism and racial literacy in their pedagogy.
Design/methodology/approach
The authors snowball sampled 12 veteran white high school English teachers (3–27 years’ experience) who taught in schools with substantial proportions of black students. The authors used a two-stage interview process to narrow the sample to 7 teachers who confirmed their anti-racist intentions and who wrote narratives of moments when they tried to be anti-racist, but the lesson failed in some way. The authors used a three-stage narrative analysis to analyze how racial liberalism and racial literacy were reflected in the narratives.
Findings
The veteran English teachers, despite their anti-racist intentions, told narratives that reflected racial liberalism, portraying racism as an individual and interpersonal phenomenon. Some narratives showed teachers who had taken steps toward racial literacy, but no narratives showed a fully developed sense of racial literacy, portraying the layers of institutional and structural racism in English education.
Originality/value
The sample suggests that veteran white English teachers are subject to similar limited racial literacies as novice teachers. While the authors found glimmers of racial literacy, they still note the work necessary to equip veteran English teachers with the racial literacies necessary for anti-racist instruction. The authors propose directions for teacher education, systemic support and professional development.
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Izhar Oplatka and Riki Vertaimer
The current study explored the process of emotion regulation among Ultra-Orthodox female teachers in Jewish educational system in Israel.
Abstract
Purpose
The current study explored the process of emotion regulation among Ultra-Orthodox female teachers in Jewish educational system in Israel.
Design/methodology/approach
The study employed a semi-structured interview comprising 13 Ultra-Orthodox female teachers in single-sex education for girls.
Findings
The teachers preferred to suppress their positive and negative emotions rather than displaying them in their interactions with students, emphasizing the importance of self-restraint and self-control in their professional work and in their religious society.
Originality/value
The paper sheds light on the connection between traditional societies whose culture is grounded deeply in their religious faith and teachers' modes of emotion regulation. The findings may enhance the understanding of cultural and contextual influences on teachers' emotion regulation and shed light on the ways in which female teachers balance their personal feelings with emotional rules in the religious society in which they live and work.
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This paper aims to discuss the significance of teacher authorship (jissen kiroku) developed during jugyo kenkyu. Specifically, it explores the structural conditions of jugyo kenkyu…
Abstract
Purpose
This paper aims to discuss the significance of teacher authorship (jissen kiroku) developed during jugyo kenkyu. Specifically, it explores the structural conditions of jugyo kenkyu that enabled the flourishing of jissen kiroku.
Design/methodology/approach
To find how jissen kiroku developed in jugyo kenkyu, this paper settled triad of authors-text-readers as the analytical perspective. Disputes through 1960s–1980s are adequate to inquire because it can elucidate how readers read jissen kiroku, which is typically challenging to observe.
Findings
Jissen kiroku is a powerful tool for semantically preserving, reconstructing and consolidating professional values and knowledge in jugyo kenkyu with deepening connoisseurship. Voluntary educational research associations (VERAs) encourage teachers to write and read jissen kiroku to develop their professionalism, which also helped develop exclusive semantics within the field. These developments were possible due to the public nature of jissen kiroku, disseminated to lesson study (LS) actors, thereby strengthening discussions both inside and outside VERAs.
Research limitations/implications
The paper proposes shift in views on educational science and emphasizes authorship as authority in that professionalism of teaching can be protected and elevated through authoring.
Originality/value
The significant roles of writing practice have not been explored enough. This paper finds the value of authorship in terms of public nature and openness to all teachers which enable the enhancement of professionalism of the LS field.
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The Instagram site, teacherwhispers, was created as part of a qualitative research project that chronicled the stories and lived experience of preservice and graduate teachers…
Abstract
Purpose
The Instagram site, teacherwhispers, was created as part of a qualitative research project that chronicled the stories and lived experience of preservice and graduate teachers. Since 2020, the purpose of the study was to identify themes connected to the participants' experiences of current trends in education. The intent was to situate the research as a critical interruption into the bigger political discourses surrounding education. The study sought to question why pedagogical practices are increasingly being positioned and located for political and economic reasons and to frame the questions of how we emerge as teachers in specific moments in time.
Design/methodology/approach
The methodology employed in the project was ethnographic and narrative-based, representing stories of teachers and teaching. Ethnography as embodiment contributes to an evocative portrayal of the participants' experiences. Teacher stories can be used to progress understandings of schools and schooling and play an important role in reflecting upon and learning from experience.
Findings
The selection of posts from teacherwhispers have brought into sharp focus the broad range of difficulties and rewards that are inherent in teaching. The site has been a microcosm of current issues in education. As a problematic and uncomfortable site of public pedagogy, it has been a site for sharing the realities, specificities and challenges of situatedness. The places where teachers work within their respective communities are highly diverse and can be a source of pressure both professionally and personally. Consequently, in the analysis of teacherwhispers, generalisations have been avoided.
Research limitations/implications
As a repository of data for research, a public online site has its challenges; research is meant to be generalisable but in teaching each setting is unique and generalisations can be problematic. Sites of public pedagogy for teachers tend to be kaleidoscopic representations: diverse locations, groups, interests and disciplines. They are a stark reminder to be sceptical of accepting the statement, “research tells us” without questioning the positioning and biases that are inherently at play.
Practical implications
Practical elements of the project have included navigating a public online space for the dissemination of data.
Social implications
Created in the spirit of problematising the methodology of public pedagogy, the online space at the centre of this project eventuated into something of a definition of what can be problematic in defining teachers' spaces of connection. The site was a place where opinions were expressed in confidentiality and that problematised methodology by putting into question what that methodology may be in a public sphere. What came forth as a result of putting methodology at the centre, rather than a definite answer, was unpredictability.
Originality/value
The online space has been an original place to display unanalysed data. The willingness to tell stories through an intermediary was juxtaposed by the public readership's unwillingness to engage with the stories, which would have meant exposing their identity. The online space is one that is increasingly relevant in public sharing and communications relating to communities of practice. This research is a critical interruption to the bigger political discourses in education. It questions why pedagogical practices are increasingly politicised. The project has been significant in mapping the stories of emerging educators at a time of unprecedented pedagogical change.
The aim of this paper is to explore the importance of individual learner differences and the effect differentiated instruction (DI) has on learners' levels of engagement.
Abstract
Purpose
The aim of this paper is to explore the importance of individual learner differences and the effect differentiated instruction (DI) has on learners' levels of engagement.
Design/methodology/approach
The author carried out this research using a small-scale action research (AR) study.
Findings
The findings suggest that in acknowledging and responding to individual learner differences, especially interests, levels of learner engagement are positively affected.
Research limitations/implications
This study’s key limitations were sample size, short-term study and potential teacher as researcher bias.
Practical implications
Recommendations were made for a further longitudinal study into the relationship between DI and language learner levels of engagement at University. An additional study into DI that looksbeyond language learning at HE, could add value to pedagogic approaches, which could make courses of greater intrinsic value to its students.
Originality/value
This research study aims to help fill a gap in the literature on the application of DI, as well as a unique perspective into its effect on learner engagement within a university context.
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Misaa Nassir and Pascale Benoliel
Studies have shown that teachers' perceptions and expectations of their working environment shape their perceived stress. The present study draws upon implicit leadership theory…
Abstract
Purpose
Studies have shown that teachers' perceptions and expectations of their working environment shape their perceived stress. The present study draws upon implicit leadership theory and builds on the job demands-control (JD-C) model to investigate whether there are differences in the implications of participative decision-making and paternalistic leadership for teachers' perceived stress in the Israeli Arab education system.
Design/methodology/approach
Data were collected through validated questionnaires returned by a two-stage cluster random sampling of 350 teachers randomly chosen from 70 Israeli Arab elementary schools. Paternalistic leadership and participative decision-making were considered as group-level variables to lower the risk of common method variance. The proposed model was tested through hierarchical regression analysis. Finally, to test the hypothesis that paternalistic leadership and participative decision-making standardized beta weights were statistically significantly different from each other, their corresponding 95% confidence intervals were estimated via bias corrected bootstrap (1000 re-samples).
Findings
The findings indicated differences in the levels of the principal's paternalistic leadership and participative decision-making as perceived by the Israeli Arab teachers. Also, the results indicated that participative decision-making was negatively correlated with teachers' perceived stress beyond the influence of paternalistic leadership.
Originality/value
Examining teachers' working conditions and resources can be important since they affect teachers' perceived stress, which may in turn affects school results in the Arab education system in Israel. This study can contribute to the development of training programs for teachers to improve and adapt principals' leadership practices to the sociocultural context of the Arab education system in Israel.
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This study primarily aims at assessing Faculty Competences Development Components (FCDCs) that help in the development of educational leaders. The study further formulates a model…
Abstract
Purpose
This study primarily aims at assessing Faculty Competences Development Components (FCDCs) that help in the development of educational leaders. The study further formulates a model using seven latent constructs that explain the development of the mechanism of development of educational leaders and extend the benefits of their development to different stakeholders including faculty, educational institutions and society at large.
Design/methodology/approach
A systematic review of the literature was conducted to identify various FCDCs to construct a conceptual framework. Later, this conceptual framework was tested through empirical research using the structural equation modeling (SEM) technique carried out with respect to technical institutions of Punjab (India).
Findings
The study identified that organizational roles are of the highest importance for the competences development of educational leaders followed by teachers’ attributes and teachers’ roles. The study’s findings also revealed that FCDCs significantly impact beneficiaries by developing competent educational leaders as mediators between the FCDCs and beneficiaries link. The biggest beneficiaries of development are faculty members of these institutes in terms of their performance enhancements.
Originality/value
The study is unique in terms of developing a model for the competences development of educational leaders and helpful in understanding various benefits of the educational leaders to various educational stakeholders.
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Makesh Gopalakrishnan and Ajish Abu
Literature evidences that altruism and conscientiousness are very important discretionary behaviours within the broader framework of Organizational Citizenship Behaviour (OCB…
Abstract
Purpose
Literature evidences that altruism and conscientiousness are very important discretionary behaviours within the broader framework of Organizational Citizenship Behaviour (OCB) among teaching community. The present study is intended to examine the effect of role clarity, perceived cohesion and felt responsibility on altruism and conscientiousness among college teachers in Kerala.
Design/methodology/approach
A questionnaire-based survey was conducted among 354 college teachers, and the causal effect was examined using Partial Least Square-based structural equation modelling.
Findings
Validity and reliability of the model were established through measurement model evaluation. Explanatory power of the model was established. Cohesion and felt responsibility significantly predicted altruism, but the effect of role clarity on altruism was not significant. Effect of cohesion, felt responsibility and role clarity on conscientiousness was significant.
Originality/value
The study contributed to the existing theory on antecedents of OCB. The model has high levels of predictive accuracy – role clarity, cohesiveness and felt responsibility – capable of explaining the discretionary behaviour among college teachers.
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Sarah Jane Kaka, Lauren M. Colley and Ryan Suskey
In the Fall of 2020, three teacher educators in Ohio collaborated on a three-month long online professional development series on how to write Focused Inquiries, a la the Inquiry…
Abstract
Purpose
In the Fall of 2020, three teacher educators in Ohio collaborated on a three-month long online professional development series on how to write Focused Inquiries, a la the Inquiry Design Model (IDM).
Design/methodology/approach
The authors detail the contents of the six group professional development (PD) sessions and share the lessons that the authors learned as a result of leading this training.
Findings
Given this study’s mixed results, the authors often came back to the questions of “maybe it was us? Maybe it was the pandemic? Maybe there wasn’t enough training? Or maybe IDM creation isn’t a skill that all teachers possess and maybe that’s ok?” The authors share the struggles with these questions and situate all of this within the current culture wars raging around schools today.
Originality/value
Finally, the authors offer the current approach to inquiry training for teachers that situates inquiry creation later in the process after significant structured introductory work.
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Rachelle Curcio, Rebecca Smith Hill and Kate Ascetta
The paper aims to examine how a professional development school-district (PDS-D) partnership, enacting an improvement science stance, collectively explored social-emotional…
Abstract
Purpose
The paper aims to examine how a professional development school-district (PDS-D) partnership, enacting an improvement science stance, collectively explored social-emotional learning (SEL) during collaboratively designed professional learning experiences.
Design/methodology/approach
This qualitative study, guided by an improvement science orientation, enacted an iterative research design. Data sources consisted of anecdotal field notes and artifacts from 12 professional learning sessions. Using a constant comparative method, the authors applied an inductive thematic analysis to identify salient themes across data related to teacher wonderings and identified goals.
Findings
The paper illuminates teachers' voices while highlighting information gleaned from participant wonderings, their identified goals and how this information informed the iterative development of future professional learning experiences within a district-university partnership.
Research limitations/implications
Due to the chosen research approaches and limited number of participants, the research results may lack generalizability.
Originality/value
This paper provides original insight into collaborative development of recursive professional learning experiences within partnership spaces.
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