Teacher-targeted bullying and harassment in Australian schools: a challenge to teacher wellbeing

Abstract

This article sets out discursive issues surrounding bullying and harassment against teachers. This problematic phenomenon of teachers being bullied by students does not have the discursive policy framework to realistically and even-handedly enable discussion in the public arena or political and policy environments. This discussion chronicles our journey towards greater conceptual clarity and appropriate nomenclature about bullying and harassing behaviours directed against teachers. International studies have identified teacher-targeted bullying by students as a real and detrimental issue for teacher wellbeing. We present a sampling of international research that grapples with the challenge of defining the phenomenon of teachers as targets of intentional bullying and harassment by students. We consider Australian studies conducted in the past twenty years that address teachers’ perceptions of being bullied. Finally, we propose that this phenomenon is likely to continue until there is sufficient support to start a cultural shift towards more respectful treatment of teachers.     

In Search of Unicorns and Effective Teacher Education

This article examines the merits of WebQuests in facilitating students’ in-depth understanding of science concepts using the four principles of learning gathered from the National Research Council reports How People Learn: Brain, Mind, Experience, and School (1999) and the How Students Learn: Science in the Classroom (2005) as an analytic framework. Modifications needed to make a well-constructed WebQuests for science teaching aligned to the four principles include (1) integrating student science interests and cultural and social backgrounds to curricular goals and then using this as means to design WebQuests, (2) providing students opportunities to examine science-related Internet websites to discriminate credible and false information and then giving them the opportunity to include and use the websites for the task step in WebQuests, and (3) providing cognitive tools and guidance within the process step so that students are engaged in argumentation and negotiation akin to a community of scientists.     

Elementary Forms of the Quick Word Test

To assess whether different response patterns were associated with differences in the naming and placement of response categories, 1,000 undergraduate students in educational administration completed a 10-item personal-values questionnaire. Five different forms, each answered by 200 students, were employed, differing only in the response categories which could be selected. Different distributions were obtained, depending upon whether “Undecided” was placed in the midpoint of an agreement-disagreement scale, or separated from that scale. Naming of the midpoint by “Undecided” and “Neutral” also produced different response patterns. The results indicate a need for further investigation of the effects of given scales upon responses before advanced statistical techniques are applied.