Facilitating student well-being: relationships do matter

Background: Alongside academic and vocational goals, schools are increasingly being called upon to address student well-being. Existing evidence suggests that strong relationships and a sense of connectedness in school communities are important for fostering subjective well-being. However, identifying the specific nature of such relational dynamics, and accommodating the ‘personal’ within school cultures increasingly dominated by ‘performance’ narratives, remains a problematic task.

Purpose: This paper draws on Honneth’s recognition theory to offer fresh insight into how relationships act to facilitate and limit the experience of well-being at school. We suggest that such an approach holds considerable potential for developing teachers’ understanding of the tacit and explicit ways they and their students experience being cared for, respected and valued and the ways in which such actions impact on well-being.

Design and methods: The paper reports the qualitative findings from a large mixed-method study, involving students and staff across primary and secondary schools in three regions of Australia. The qualitative phase involved focus groups with 606 primary and secondary students and individual interviews with 89 teachers and principals.

Results: Across the focus groups and interviews, students and teachers placed substantial emphasis on the importance of relationships, while reporting differences in their views about which relationships support well-being. Alongside this, there were differences in the importance teachers and students placed on each of the three strands of Honneth’s recognition theory (translated for this study as being cared for, respected and valued) for influencing student well-being.

Conclusions: The findings affirm the critical role that relationships play in promoting well-being in the context of schools. Using recognition theory to analyse students’ and teachers’ views and experiences of well-being provides much greater insight into how these relationships are enacted – this being through the mutual experience of being cared for, respected and valued – within the context of schools.     

Teachers’ beliefs and educational reform in India: from ‘learner-centred’ to ‘learning-centred’ education

ABSTRACT

The challenges faced by learner-centred education (LCE) reforms in developing countries may be partly explained by their failure to engage with the culturally shaped beliefs in which teachers’ practice is rooted. Drawing from a mixed methods study of 60 government primary teachers in India, this research points to cultural tensions faced by LCE reforms in India. Although India’s own Constitutional values and pedagogical reform movements support LCE’s ideals, many teachers’ beliefs are shaped by dominant ideologies that contradict LCE’s assumptions. Imposing a predetermined, ‘Western’ model of LCE practice will inevitably face challenges if not supported by teachers’ underlying beliefs – and in fact contradicts LCE’s own ideals of empowering teacher agency. Instead, the paper argues for pedagogical reforms to focus less on a predesigned model of learner-centred practice and more on its underlying beliefs: by seeking to instil culturally relevant learning-centred beliefs, and involving teachers themselves in determining what learning-centred practice might look like within their context.     

Developing an instrument for assessing students’ concepts of the nature of technology

Background: In Bangladesh, a common science curriculum caters for all students at the junior secondary level. Since this curriculum is for all students, its aims are both to build a strong foundation in science while still providing students with the opportunities to use science in everyday life – an aim consistent with the notion of scientific literacy.

Purpose: This paper reports Bangladeshi science teachers’ perspectives and practices in regard to the promotion of scientific literacy.

Sample: Six science teachers representing a range of geographical locations, school types with different class sizes, lengths of teaching experience and educational qualifications.

Design and method: This study employed a case study approach. The six teachers and their associated science classes (including students) were considered as six cases. Data were gathered through observing the teachers’ science lessons, interviewing them twice – once before and once after the lesson observation, and interviewing their students in focus groups.

Results: This study reveals that participating teachers held a range of perspectives on scientific literacy, including some naïve perspectives. In addition, their perspectives were often not seen to be realised in the classroom as for teachers the emphasis of learning science was more traditional in nature. Many of their teaching practices promoted a culture of academic science that resulted in students’ difficulty in finding connections between the science they study in school and their everyday lives. This research also identified the tension which teachers encountered between their religious values and science values while they were teaching science in a culture with a religious tradition.

Conclusions: The professional development practice for science teachers in Bangladesh with its emphasis on developing science content knowledge may limit the scope for promoting the concepts of scientific literacy. Opportunities for developing pedagogic knowledge is also limited and consequently impacts on teachers’ ability to develop the concepts of scientific literacy and learn how to teach for its promotion.     

Talking about education: exploring the significance of teachers’ talk for teacher agency

Abstract

The interest in teachers’ discourses and vocabularies has for a long time been studied under the rubric of knowledge, most notably teachers’ professional knowledge. This interest can be traced back to Shulman’s distinction between different kinds of teacher knowledge and Schwab’s interest in the role of practical reasoning and judgement in teaching. Within the research, a distinction can be found between a more narrow approach that focuses on teachers’ propositional or theoretical knowledge and a more encompassing approach in which teachers’ knowledge is not only the knowledge for teachers generated elsewhere, but also the knowledge of teachers. This is the ‘stock of knowledge’ gained from a range of sources and experiences, including teachers’ ongoing engagement with the practice of teaching itself. In this paper, we focus on the role of teachers’ talk in their achievement of agency. We explore how, in what way and to what extent such talk helps or hinders teachers in exerting control over and giving direction to their everyday practices, bearing in mind that such practices are not just the outcome of teachers’ judgements and actions, but are also shaped by the structures and cultures within which teachers work.     

Child Sexual Abuse Prevention Education: A Qualitative Study of Teachers’ Experiences Implementing the Second Step Child Protection Unit

Abstract

This study explored teachers’ reactions to implementing a Pre-K-Grade 5 school-based child sexual abuse prevention education program. Fifty-seven classroom teachers and two school counselors attended one of nine focus groups conducted after the implementation of the Committee for Children’s Second Step Child Protection Unit. Teachers discussed their feelings about teaching the unit before and after implementation, their students’ reactions to the lessons, and parental feedback. Initially, teachers were anxious and apprehensive about teaching the six-lesson curriculum but found the experience to be positive and rewarding. Students engaged enthusiastically with the lessons, and parental pushback was minimal. Challenges and recommendations for implementing teacher-led personal safety education are discussed.     

Photovoice as an evaluation tool for student learning on a field trip

Background: Photovoice is one method that enables an educator to view an experience from a student’s perspective. This study examined how teachers might use photovoice during an informal learning experience to understand the students’ experiences and experiential gain.

Design and methods: Participants in this study consisted of six students, three male and three female, ranging from ninth through twelfth grade at a rural Ohio high school, who attended a field trip to a biological field station for a four-day immersive science experience. Students were provided cameras to photograph what they believed was important, interesting, or significant during an immersive four-day science trip to a biological field station, individualizing their observations in ways meaningful to them, and enabling them to assimilate or accommodate the experiences to their schema.

Results: Analysis identified five positive benefits to use photovoice as an evaluation tool: teachers were provided qualitative evidence to evaluate student interaction on the field trip; teachers could evaluate the students’ photographs and captions to determine if the field trip met the learning objectives; students were empowered to approach the goals and objectives of the field trip by making the field trip personally relevant; students assimilated and accommodated the new observations and experiences to their own schema; students automatically reflected upon the learning experience as they captioned the photos.

Conclusions: Through photovoice, the teachers were enabled to qualitatively assess each student’s experience and learning from the field trip by illustrating what the students experienced and thought was significant; providing the teachers a method to evaluate all participating students, including those who are secretive or do not normally contribute to class discussions.     

The professional role and identity of teachers in the private and state education sectors

Abstract

This paper compares the professional role and identity of teachers in private and state schools. It brings together theory within the sociology of the professions and approaches influenced by Basil Bernstein. It utilises his work on recontextualisation to identify the nature of teachers’ professional role; and Beck and Young’s (2010) Bernstein-influenced analytical framework to understand changes in these teachers’ professional identity. Drawing on focussed qualitative research the study shows how, within private schools, when cloistered from the Official Recontextualising Field (ORF) an idealized account of teachers’ professional work flourishes. This idealized understanding of occupational professionalism is contingent on the ‘othering’ of the state sector: to do this private-school teachers adopt a deprofessionalization discourse which represents the state teacher as a passive receiver of the ORF. In contrast, state teachers foreground their agency to negotiate competing professional logics which they express through hybrid approaches to professional practice.     

Sixth graders in Israel recount their experience of verbal abuse by teachers in the classroom

AimThis study adopts a children’s rights perspective stated in Articles 3, 12, 19, 28 of the Convention on the Rights of Children (1989) with the goal of listening to Israeli children articulate their experience of verbal abuse by teachers in 6th grade classroomsMethodsA purposeful sample of sixty students was individually interviewed and content analysis was performed following Strauss’ (1987) constant comparative method.ResultsStudents reported teachers’ yelling, name-calling and put-downs when failing to pay attention, complete their work, or obtain good grades. They condemned teachers as particularly hurtful and cruel for publically humiliating them in class. However, awareness of teachers’ authority and fear of reprisal led to students’ silence and reluctance to report the abuse to their parents or principal. Covert opposition was nevertheless exhibited as students engaged in a silent monologue telling teachers they had no right to mistreat them (females), silently cursing (males) and/or withdrawing participation (both genders). Repeated public humiliation and scapegoating resulted in the loss of interest in teacher’s opinion and school and on rare occasions to the direct verbal confrontation or acting-out behaviour of the abused student.ConclusionThis study stresses the importance of gaining insight into the world of children by having them articulate their experience and denounce any form of abuse by teachers in the classroom. A child-safe school culture that listen to children’s view and make them feel safe when reporting any form of abuse in the classroom are preconditions to serving children’s best interests and wellbeing in schools.     

Digital play as a means to develop children’s literacy and power in the Swedish preschool

Abstract

This paper presents different angles on the subject of digital play as a means to develop children’s literacy and power, using an online ethnographical study of Swedish preschool teachers’ discussions in informal online forums. Question posts (n = 239) were analysed using the Technological Pedagogical Knowledge framework and the Caring, Nurturing and Teaching framework, with the aim of understanding how teachers intended to support children’s literacy development with tablets. Literacy development can be understood as a social practice that needs to develop along with changes in society’s demands on citizens. The results presented indicate that school subject oriented skills are predominantly present in the mind-set of these preschool teachers. When digital play is increasingly used for pedagogical purposes in preschools, that also means that preschools have expanded their opportunities to work with children’s literacy development. For preschool teachers, it is important to discuss how literacy development can be supported in a contemporary media landscape.     

Reciprocal learning in teacher education between Canada and China

ABSTRACT

The Preservice Teacher Education Reciprocal Learning Programme has been developed on a vision of bridging the East and West dichotomy by harmonising Eastern learning with Western knowledge. This programme is one of the two foundations for Xu and Connelly’s 7-year Canada-China Reciprocal Learning Partnership in teacher education and school education in 2013-2020. The Programme, ‘provide[s] an exceptional cross-cultural experience with international engagement … to broaden teacher candidates’ horizons for a society of increasing diversity in today’s globalized world’. This article’s purposes are to discuss how reciprocal learning is both a concept and an approach for international and cross-cultural teacher education and school education and to present the learning outcomes and educational significance of the East-West reciprocal learning programme in teacher education. The Programme has created opportunities for both pre-service and in-service teachers to understand and appreciate a culture and educational system different from their own, thereby reciprocally contributing to educational opportunities for those they teach. The research theory and method utilised in this work are found in a companion paper in this special series and are briefly discussed below in the project overview and later in a discussion of student outcomes. This work has implications for other school settings where increasing immigrant student population and cultural diversity have become the norm.     

Post‐welfarism and the reconstruction of teachers’ work in the UK

A key rationale for the UK education reforms of the 1980s and 1990s was a desire on the part of agents within the state to control more directly the work of teachers. In a variety of ways, the reforms were designed to contribute to a reconstruction of the work of teaching. The first part of this paper considers the roots of this intended reconstruction. The second part explores the impact of the reforms on the culture of teachers’ work, focusing on three kinds of consequences ‐ emotional, social and pedagogical. The paper draws on loosely‐structured interviews with secondary school teachers, carried out as part of a study of the culture and values of schooling in the light of the shift from wel‐farist to post‐welfarist policies in education.     

‘The history of the Ouinkai’ – the alumni association of the Tokyo higher normal school for women: a milestone in Japan’s education for women

ABSTRACT

The book, The History of the Ouinkai, was published in 1940 as a commemorative project for the 60th anniversary of the Tokyo Higher Normal School for Women (THNSW). The purpose of this article is to illustrate the type of data collected in the surveys and their findings, to explore some of the activities of the association, and to discuss how the Ouinkai alumni association, in collaboration with THNSW, worked with female teachers nationwide. The paper traces some of the multi-norms and multi-roles for female teachers that THNSW promoted and their relation to norms thought to characterise ‘ideal’ Japanese women. The publication of The History of the Ouinkai was a milestone in Japanese women’s education because it demonstrated the Ouinkai’s successes in respect of Japanese educational policy for women as well as the leadership that the Ouinkai provided to female graduate teachers, whom it organised with skill.     

‘Gems Unwrought Can Form Nothing Useful’: Socialist China’s Pedagogical Erasure of Individuality, 1949–1958

ABSTRACT

This article investigates socialist China’s pedagogic treatment of individuality between 1949 and 1958, with a focus on the debates concerning ‘all-round development’ and ‘teaching in accordance with aptitude’, two principles that clashed regarding students’ individuality. It reconstructs how educational bureaucrat and theorist Zhang Lingguang spearheaded the debates in People’s Education, China’s leading educational journal. Building on the existing idealistic, critical and cultural perspectives on the debates, this article offers an analysis of power dynamics on three levels. Interpersonally, bureaucrats and ideologues were in conflict with ordinary teachers from local schools. Institutionally, People’s Education mediated between the Ministry of Education and teachers nationwide, while managing its accountability. (Inter)nationally, the debates were conditioned by the changing Sino–Soviet relationship, and by the Hundred Flowers Campaign.     

Student Evaluation in Co‐operative Learning: teacher cognitions

Abstract

This paper concerns recognition of the authority of teachers’ personal practical knowledge. An Australian teacher reports on her three‐and‐a‐half‐year collaborative study with a Canadian junior high school teacher. The research follows a line of research on teacher knowledge (Elbaz, 1983; Clandinin, 1986; Connelly & Clandinin, 1988; Clandinin & Connelly, 1995) informed by Dewey's (1938) philosophy of education based on experience. Narrative inquiry (Connelly & Clandinin, 1990) is the methodology guiding the study. A summary of five papers on teacher knowledge emerging from the study is presented. These papers show how the research knowledge is constructed as the researcher and collaborating teacher examine their narratives of experience as a means to articulating their understandings of curriculum and teacher knowledge. This dissertation research argues for recognition of teachers’ personal practical knowledge as knowledge and for recognition of collaborative research as educative for teachers. The implications of this research concern teachers authoring their development and the ways in which teachers’ knowledge is systemically denied.     

School-Contextual Paths to Student Bullying Behaviour: Teachers Under Time Pressure are Less Likely to Intervene and the Students Know It!

ABSTRACT

We assessed whether the level of time-pressure reported by a school’s teachers is predictive of student bullying perpetration. We combined data from two surveys conducted in 129 schools in 2016: the Stockholm School Survey performed among students in grades 9 and 11 (n?=?10,668), and the Stockholm Teacher Survey carried out among senior level (grades 7–9) and upper secondary school (grades 10–12) teachers (n?=?2259). Multilevel path analyses showed that teachers’ stress and time-pressure increased with declining school leadership functioning. Teachers’ level of time-pressure was, in turn, positively associated with student traditional and cyberbullying behaviour, through its effect on the school staff’s tendency (not) to intervene against bullying, but not through the teachers’ stress level. We conclude that schools with leadership that provides opportunities for the teachers to focus on their main mission can counteract bullying among the students and therefore indirectly also to promote student health.     

Adaptation in the transition to school: perspectives of parents,preschool and primary school teachers

Background: Transition to school is a highly demanding phase at an intellectual, social and emotional level and is, therefore, an opportunity for growth and development. Despite the greater emphasis given to school transition in Portugal over recent years, namely by means of new educational policies, studies on the adaptation processes involved in the transition to primary school are still scarce.

Purpose: The present qualitative study sets out to contribute to the knowledge on the adaptation process of children to school transition (around age 6) in Portugal, by comparing preschool teachers’, primary school teachers’, and parents’ perceptions about success indicators and relevant factors in the transition to school.

Design and method: In order to collect data, 14 focus group interviews with different participants were conducted, three with preschool teachers (N = 18), three with primary school teachers (N = 13), four with parents conducted before the child’s transition to primary school (N = 14) and four with parents conducted after the child’s transition to primary school (N = 20).

Results: While the preschool and primary school teachers stressed factors of a family nature, such as parental involvement and parental support of children, the parents referred more frequently to the overall running of the school and the characteristics and methodology of the teacher as being relevant to the adaptation process in the first year of primary education.

Conclusions: The findings suggest different factors associated with adaptation to school and also offer clues for designing strategies to facilitate such adaptation. New strategies are needed to facilitate the construction of a robust educational family–school partnership.     

Understanding and enhancing pupils’ learning progress in schools in deprived communities

ABSTRACT

This paper draws on data from the ‘Raising Pupil Attainment in Key Stage 1 in Stoke-on-Trent’ research project. The particular focus is on how teachers, head teachers and teaching assistants (n?=?59) articulate pupils’ learning success in five highly achieving schools in deprived communities. Six key themes are highlighted which are identified by participants as influencing successful pupil learning and progress. These are analysed in relation to Biesta's theory on the parameters of ‘Good Education’ [Biesta, G. J. J. 2010. Good Education in an Age of Measurement. Boulder, CO: Paradigm] and within Bourdieu's understanding of ‘distinction’ [Bourdieu, P. 1998. Practical Reason: On the Theory of Action. Oxford: Polity Press]. The research reveals that issues related to socialisation and subjectivity are presented as critical and foundational for the more formal measures of success in pupil learning.     

“More meaningful to do it than just reading it:” rehearsing praxis among Mexican-American/Latinx pre-service teachers

ABSTRACT

This paper explores the potential use of drama-based pedagogical tools to prepare future bilingual teachers to respond to the need for advocacy inside and outside the classroom. Using their lived experiences and class material, 20 Mexican-American/Latinx bilingual pre-service teachers performed real-life narratives of conflict experienced by local seasoned bilingual teachers during a foundational class in a preparation program in the Southwest. Using Boal’s Forum Theater, these reenactments provided bilingual pre-service teachers with a context to develop assertiveness and positionality as a means to co-construct emergent bilingual advocate-teacher identities. This paper uses critical ethnography and critical discourse analysis of video-recorded reenactments of bilingual pre-service teachers, as well as interviews and reflections.