Pre-service English language teachers’ collaborative development: the emergence of research,rehearsal and reflection (3R) model from an activity theory perspective

This study aims to understand how pre-service teachers’ activities shape (and are shaped) by the norms of schooling embedded in the national educational system from an activity theory lens. The data are obtained from video-recordings and bi-weekly reflective journals in microteaching sessions, lesson plans, classroom observations, and post feedback sessions. The analysis points to the stages, micro- and macro-networking levels that lead to the collaborative teacher development, and the emergence of a model in the growth of pre-service teachers. Overall, it is found that the development of pre-service teachers depends largely on the norms of schooling embedded in the national curriculum and the nature of training they received at undergraduate level. The paper concludes by confirming Engeström’s statement that understanding the evolution and historical change of pre-service teacher education in a special context might help investigate how activities change, develop, and interconnect with social and material structures.     

Teaching manfully? Exploring gendered subjectivities and power via analysis of men teachers’ gender performance

The notion that teachers’ classroom behaviour and interaction with pupils may be predicted on the basis of their gender underpins recent controversial campaigns to recruit more male teachers in the UK. Teachers’ performances of gender are explored in this article, which draws on three cases from a larger study to analyse the ways in which teachers ascribed male produced their gendered subjectivities in the classroom and in interviews. Findings highlight the extent of diversity in male teachers’ practice and in their constructions of gendered subjecthood, hence providing evidence to question assumptions that male teachers teach, or relate to pupils, in particular ways due to their identification as male. The analysis emphasizes the fluidity and complexity of gender, including the (novel) identification of ‘male femininity’ in male teacher performances. Yet while supportive of the argument that gender is not necessarily tied to sexed bodies, the paper illustrates how embodiment can constrain or facilitate access to, and exercise of, particular gendered discourses, with consequences for power positions. It also highlights how these processes can result in the consolidation of particularly powerful subjectivities, somewhat testing Foucauldian perceptions of power as ‘never localized’. Hence the paper presents a challenge both to education policy makers and to theorists of gender and power.     

Looking Inward: The impact of race,ethnicity, gender,and social class background on teaching sociocultural theory in education

In this paper I examine how and to what extent various elements of my biography—race, ethnicity, gender, age, social class background, and prior personal and professional experiences—influenced my relationships with students in a graduate course examining the impact of race, gender, and social class on education. My lived experiences as an immigrant woman of color in United States society and my prior professional experiences as an urban teacher are shown to have strengthened my expertise and confidence in teaching this course. Nevertheless, experience confirmed my initial concerns that my race, gender, and social class background negatively influenced some students' perceptions of my teaching competence and position of authority in the classroom. The paper concludes with recommendations for teacher education, including encouraging teachers to continuously engage the question of how their biographies shape their pedagogies and relationships with students, an important undertaking as our schooling populations become more racially, ethnically, and linguistically diverse. I also recommend that universities continue to recruit faculty who are not only from racial minority backgrounds but also from varied ethnic and social class backgrounds.     

'You're Hopeless I Swear to God': Shifting masculinities in classroom talk

In this article the author aims to problematise the discourse of masculinity in the co-educational classroom. Moving strategically sideways to focus on boys rather than girls, it is argued that 'masculinity' is not a fixed essence but a shifting gendered social identity. Although mass culture generally assumes there is a fixed, true masculinity, not all boys and men take up the same kind of masculinity, nor do they experience 'maleness' in the same way. Social class and subcultures (as well as other inflections of identity not discussed in this article) profoundly affect the presentation and representation of masculine identities. Moreover, masculinity as a particular configuration of gender is constituted in relation to local contexts within the meritocratic discourse of schooling. The ethnographic data in this article, which focuses on boys relating to girls in the classroom, show how varied the contexts of gender production can be even within the same roughly parallel configurations of task and location. It is concluded that masculinity is above all a social identity accomplishment.     

‘Go,go on and go higher an’ higher’. Second‐generation Turks’ understanding of the role of education and their struggle through the Dutch school system

With reference to capital theories and rational choice theory, this paper aims to understand how abilities and schooling ambitions are intertwined with social class, gender and ethnicity. By drawing on 16 in‐depth interviews carried out with highly educated second‐generation Turks in the Netherlands, the paper discusses the resources, opportunities and educational attitudes of young people, together with the role of the school system and that of teachers in perpetuating ethnic inequalities in schooling, with special emphasis on gender differences in schooling ambitions.     

Teachers’ perceptions and students’ lived experiences in Vocational–Technical subjects in a rural high school in Zimbabwe

This paper explores the construction of dominant models of gender among students in the Vocational–Technical. In the backdrop of dominant narratives that structure gender policies and practices in schooling in Zimbabwe, the paper elaborates upon how students’ daily experiences in workrooms perpetuate the feminisation and masculinisation of fields of study such as DT and HESs in ways that inhibit the learning and achievement of boys and girls in these subjects. The argument in this paper is that in order to understand gender inequality in the Voc-Tech curriculum, educators need to understand how sociocultural perceptions of gender are constructed and embodied at the level of classroom interaction among students and teachers. Such insights provide a deeper understanding for addressing gender inequality in Voc-Tech subjects that moves beyond current structural and institutional barriers within a rural African context.     

“Pirates Can Be Male or Female”: Investigating Gender-Inclusivity in a Years 2/3 Classroom

The term gender-inclusive has become well known in Australian education since the late 1980s. In policy terms, it is associated with an education structured to value girls and women, their knowledge and experience, equally with that of boys and men. This paper reports an analysis of the gender-inclusivity of teaching and learning activities in a combined Year 2/3 class studying an integrated, science and technology topic themed about pirates. The data include field notes from class visits, interviews with the teacher, informal conversations with children, a videotape recording of one class and inspection of children's work. The content of an inherently gendered topic, like pirates, provides teachers with opportunities to challenge the structure of gender in ways that enable children to begin to understand how males and females are positioned in the prevailing discourse and how some groups are privileged over others. In this Year 2/3 class, the teacher was able to help children to develop different views of, in this case, who pirates are, what they might do, and what a more socially just pirate existence might be like. Opportunities to challenge the gendered way we think about things, even pirates, are taken too infrequently in our classrooms.     

Gender-blind racism in the experience of schooling and identity formation

Much of the research dealing with education and race has concentrated on the experiences of black males. Research now needs to address the issue of how schools affect the production of black femininities. The aim is to explore how both black males and females adapt to schooling, and school exclusion in particular. Previous theoretical models often situate black women within the stereotype of the ‘superwoman’ and negate the experiences of black females in families that are not female-headed. Previous research also suggests that much of the black male pupil response to schooling is based on the way in which teachers equate disaffection with black masculinity. The study draws on research in schools with pupils aged from 13 to 15 years when observed and interviewed. Many pupils responded to schooling in a way that cut across race and gender. Pupils often attempted to subvert the traditional relationship of teacher as powerful and pupil as powerless, reacting to this relationship through their own racial and gendered backgrounds. It is argued that teachers often speak of black pupils in homogeneous ways when in fact gendered differences exist. The issue of how schools construct blackness is addressed and it is argued that too often this is simply to equate race with masculinity.     

‘The world must stop when I’m talking’: gender and power relations in primary teachers’ classroom talk

The present paper examines male and female teachers’ language practices in relation to ‘censuring’ talk in the primary classroom, in the context of the debate around boys’ ‘underachievement’ and the ‘feminisation’ of primary school culture. Through an analysis of classroom observations with 51 men and women teachers, it looks to see whether gender differences could be found in the ways individual men and women teachers communicated in terms of their ‘censuring’ comments of pupils’ work or behaviour. Secondly, the paper takes issue with the notion that teachers operate within a ‘feminised’ educational culture, by looking at the ways in which teachers’ classroom talk can be seen to be constrained by two contrasting discourses relating to the power relation between teacher and pupil: a ‘traditional’ disciplinarian discourse, and a more ‘progressive’ liberal discourse. Both discourses have complex gendered and class dimensions, challenging the conception of a ‘feminised’ primary school culture.     

Science teaching self-efficacy in a primary school: A case study

Bandura's theory of self-efficacy predicts that teachers with high, self-efficacy should persist longer, provide a greater academic focus in child-centred classrooms and exhibit different types of feedback than teachers who have lower self-efficacy. This paper reports on the science teaching self-efficacy in a group of teachers at a state primary school. The research was conducted in two stages using firstly the Science Teaching Efficacy Beliefs Instrument (STEBI-A) to identify cases, and secondly, a semistructured interview coupled with classroom observations. Thirty seven teaching staff were surveyed with the STEBI-A instrument. The five highest and five lowest scoring teachers on the personal science teaching self-efficacy subscale of the STEBI-A were interviewed. The analysis of interviews and observations indicated that teachers with high personal science teaching self-efficacy have had a long interest in science and a relatively strong background of formal science studies with opportunities for exploring out of school activities. Although they may have experienced negative science experiences in their own schooling other ameliorating factors existed which maintained their interest. Their instructional strategies in science lessons were more child-centred than those reported by teachers with lower personal science teaching self-efficacy. The implications of the results for the inservice training of teachers are discussed.     

When genres meet: Inquiry into a sixth‐grade urban science class

In this study, we explore oral and written work (plays and rap songs) of students in a sixth‐grade all African‐American urban science class to reveal ways affective and social aspects are intertwined with students' cognition. We interpret students' work in terms of the meeting of various genres brought by the students and teachers to the classroom. Students bring youth genres, classroom genres that they have constructed from previous schooling, and perhaps their own science genres. Teachers bring their favored classroom and science genres. We show how students' affective reactions were an integral part of their constructed scientific knowledge. Their knowledge building emerged as a social process involving a range of transactions among students and between students and teacher, some transactions being relatively smooth and others having more friction. Along with their developing science genre, students portrayed elements of classroom genres that did not exist in the classroom genre that the teacher sought to bring to the class. Students' work offered us a glimpse of students' interpretations of gender dynamics in their classrooms. Gender also was related to the particular ways that students in that class included disagreement in their developing science genre. © 2002 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. J Res Sci Teach 39: 579–605, 2002     

Teacher and learners’ belief in a just world and perspectives of discipline of Grade 4 - 8 learners in South African schools

In the present study, we examine the personal belief in a just world (PBJW) for teachers and learners in predominantly Afrikaans-speaking South African schools, and the relationship between teachers’ PBJW and their perception of problem behaviour in the classroom. The study is informed by national debates of school violence in South African schools, and international debates on zero-tolerance policies to address school violence. Our findings suggest that teachers’ PBJW predicts their perception of problem behaviour in classroom behaviour in four areas, namely challenging authority, disrespecting rules and authority and teacher negativity. Teachers with a strong PBJW were more likely to view classroom behaviours as problematic. Children generally reported that their teachers were fair and just and liked them. However, boys were more likely to have experienced trouble with their teachers and to view them as unfair and unjust. We discuss the significance of the findings in terms of school violence and also mention gendered interpretations to school violence.     

Schooling sexualities and gendered bodies. Experiences of LGBT students in Icelandic upper secondary schools

In this paper, we study how Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgender people (LGBT) students in Icelandic upper secondary schools interpret their experience of heteronormative environment and how they respond to it. The aim is to explore how sexualities and gendered bodies are constructed through ‘schooling’. The article draws on interview data with seven LGBT students who attended five different upper secondary schools. We also use visual data collected during fieldwork at one upper secondary school and exemplify the results with a poster and a digitalised short-film, produced by the students, to substantiate what participants told us in the interviews. All of the students experienced heteronormative discourse and lack of respect and indicated that they did not feel fully accepted in school. Upon entering the classroom, the visibility of LGBTs and discussion about different performances of gender and sexuality seem to disappear, whether in terms of textbooks, course content, teaching practices and school environment. Furthermore, LGBTs and those who do not conform to the hegemonic performances of gender are often constructed as deviations from the norm, strange, and even depicted as the abjected other. This applies in particular to the informal school, which embraces the traditions, culture and social interactions among students and teachers. This othering occurs, despite relatively positive attitudes towards LGBT people in Icelandic society in general. The results signify a gap between policy and practice as regards the positioning of LBGT students, which affects their schooling and well-being.     

The limits of critical pedagogy: teaching about structural obstacles to students who overcame them

This article focuses on efforts to critically analyze the social reproductive functions of schooling with a group of pre-service teachers in the US–Mexico border region, and on students’ reactions to these efforts. The students – all female, predominantly Mexican-American – had experienced both educational discrimination and academic success, and heavily invested in the dominant view of schooling as a meritocracy where individual talent and motivation regularly overcome structural obstacles. We argue that the students’ ideologies and experiences of class, gender, ethnicity, nationality, and language predisposed them to resist analysis of systemic inequalities in schools; we also examine the implications of this resistance for their future success as teachers. We conclude with recommendations for balancing structural pessimism and strategic optimism in the classroom, and for bringing students’ personal and social histories to bear on the contradictions between schooling’s promise of social mobility and its tendency to reproduce social inequality.     

‘Man-up,go and get an ice-pack.’ Gendered stereotypes and binaries within the primary classroom: a thing of the past?

Gendered expectations are deeply embedded within the fabric of a society and the classroom is no exception; binaries habitually pervade attitudes, practices and pedagogies. This small-scale qualitative-interpretive study, undertaken in one rural primary school in North Wales, explores how the learning of gender is constructed, enacted and challenged by participants functioning within Key Stage 2 (children aged 8–11 years), issues experienced by, both girls and boys, to cogitate implications for gender equity and for teachers' work. The fieldwork revealed that many school participants continue to draw upon essentialist binary discourse, predominantly based on biological theories, to explain differences between boys and girls relating to classroom behaviour, subject attainment, curricular preferences and career pathways. Constant reference was made to acceptable ways of ‘doing masculinity’ and the ‘high-achieving, conforming school girl culture’. Children recognised gender binaries used by teachers and were aware of societal advances in gender equity. Despite decades of research and policies, we are still some way to ameliorating gender binaries and stereotypes in this phase of schooling. Therefore, there is an urgent need for practitioners to become more reflexively aware about the complex ways in which gendered dualisms and hierarchies perpetuate and dictate relations and pedagogical practices, which constrain experiences and opportunities for girls and boys and, to incorporate multiple ways of thinking and doing gender in classrooms.     

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基于社会性别理论的教师性别意识的研究——以若干中学教师个案研究为例

本文试图通过对若干中学教师的个案研究,发现影响教师性别角色意识的因素,了解女教师是如何把自己的性别角色意识渗透到课堂之中,从而对男女学生施加影响,以及她们是如何看待性别意识影响的。     

Women teachers in Hong Kong: stories of changing gendered identities

In a time of mass schooling in most parts of the world, the discourse of the “woman primary teacher” is often the subject of discourse. Yet most stories of these women teachers emerge from other (Western) contexts, with little known about how changing education processes affect the gendered identities of women in other cultural settings. This paper explores how women teachers negotiate their gendered identities in Hong Kong, where modernization has already mingled with the indigenous Chinese culture. It provides the stories of four Chinese women teachers as they engage in ongoing construction and negotiations of gendered identities over their life histories in Hong Kong. All are ethnically Chinese, of different ages and at different stages of their personal and professional lives, and all have grown up in Hong Kong. A framework of post-colonial concepts of hybridity and border crossing helps to suggest how identity resources develop in relation to a range of contemporary practices which are experienced as both pressures and opportunities. These Chinese women teachers' identities are seen to be complex, fluid and multi-faceted, continually under construction in their daily lives, with changes experienced in both work and family settings.     

Teacher and administrator perceptions of gender in the classroom

Gendered stereotypes persist in American classrooms despite efforts to create equitable learning environments. Within this qualitative study, we examined both teachers’ and administrators’ perceptions of gender in the classroom and present the data of the continued gender bias among some educators in their own words. The data showed teachers and administrators attributed conflict styles based upon gender and consistently reference boys conflict resolution style as “over quickly” in contrast to girls conflict resolution style. Likewise, participants’ gendered perceptions extended to the kinds of feedback they expected girls and boys to prefer. Additionally, our findings show that participants misunderstood or lacked knowledge of scientifically sound research and participants described changing the curriculum in a single-sex class/school to use stereotypical topics and activities for student engagement. The authors suggest this data should open a discussion between education scholars and practitioners to help align current knowledge about gender and development and implications of stereotypes for classroom practice.