Student fear in secondary schools

Our data have shown that physical aggression has an extreme psychological effect on the student body of American secondary schools; it creates a subgroup of youngsters so adversely affected by fear as to merit the often-misused label of socially disadvantaged. This study has discovered that fearful youngsters differ importantly from others by virtue of much more than simple avoidance patterns. More than others, apprehensive youth tend to dislike their school, their teachers, and their fellow students. They see themselves as suspicious of their surroundings and helpless to modify conditions of a game which appears beyond their control.     

Nostalgia in the narratives of vocational teachers as a way of understanding responses to change

ABSTRACT

This paper focuses on nostalgia in the narratives of vocational teachers. The aim is to understand the role of nostalgia as a mechanism for adapting to or resisting educational change. The paper is based on the secondary analysis of semi-structured interviews with 30 Estonian vocational teachers. In the teachers’ narratives, the nostalgia for the former vocational education system, which provided more autonomy and empowerment for teachers in their work, was overlaid with the nostalgia for a society with more stable family and work-life patterns and trusting attitudes towards vocational teachers. Although there were examples where the nostalgic narratives were strategically used to legitimize resistance to change, in most cases, nostalgia tends to serve as the mechanism for making sense of the educational changes teachers have been faced with. Nostalgia also contributes to making sense of oneself as a teacher in a new situation and collective identity building. It is argued in the paper that we should acknowledge the positive functions of nostalgia and create support mechanisms to facilitate sense-making and critical reflection upon the changes for teachers. Nostalgia should be recognized as a productive force indicating the contradictions in present reforms and practices and opening up new directions.     

Style and effectiveness in education and training: A model for organising teaching and learning

In the fields of education and training, there is nowadays an increasing recognition of the need to be effective. In order to be effective it is necessary, however, to ensure that both the content of one's teaching and its style of presentation are suitably matched to the needs and interests and abilities of the persons being taught. This in turn calls for a broadly based ecological approach in which careful attention is paid to the social and psychological conditions under which teaching and learning occur. By drawing on the pertinent literature in business management and organisation theory, the author indicates how the ecological approach might be applied to problems of style and effectiveness in education and training. A conceptual framework is developed within which it is possible to identify 4 broadly distinguishable and commonly occurring styles of teaching. The framework is then applied to an experiment in which the styles of three teachers were compared and contrasted. The paper ends with a presentation of 4 detailed hypotheses concerning the conditions under which each of the 4 proposed teaching styles is most likely to prove effective.     

教育、历史与社会之未来

艾沃·古德森对教育变革中出现的各种模式进行了理论探讨,指出国家的学校体系是世界变革力量的折射镜,理解这种社会折射过程,才能发展出一套变革的理论,才能对学校教育保持高度的灵敏度。20世纪70年代后期之前,内生变革理论一直是变革理论的关键,这一理论关注那些被教育工作者群体用以发起和促进变革的各种资源,而此后,变革理论的关注点开始转向分析并历史地比较不断变化的变革的各种条件,对外生关联和内生因素之间不断变动的平衡做出解释,从而发展出教育变革的"外生关系"模式。教育变革的两难困境只能在具体的地方情境中被理解。英国的案例表明,教育变革对"老的专业人员"之职业精神的攻击,导致了共同记忆的丧失、导师的流失、教师队伍的稳定等方面的问题。     

Changing policy contexts and teachers´ work-life narratives: the case of Estonian vocational teachers

ABSTRACT

In recent decades, the work of teachers worldwide has undergone deep change. We have seen that teachers have encountered recent challenges differently and adapted to educational changes to a different extent depending on their personal disposition, but also school leadership and workplace support. This study focuses on the example of Estonian vocational teachers that serves as an interesting case for analysing how the interplay of the transitional context and neo-liberal policy trends adopted since Estonia regained its independence in 1991, after 50 years under Soviet rule, have affected the individual trajectories of teachers’ lives. This paper aims to understand how the interplay of the institutional context and individual (work) lives shapes Estonian vocational teachers’ understandings of their work and professionality. We suggest that certain periods of practice are visible in teachers’ narratives and those periods might be considered as enabling different degrees of agency. However, our interviews also revealed that different reform periods have been perceived and responded to differently. In the context of 25 years of the educational reform process, the policies and requirements introduced have been refracted at different levels (Goodson & Rudd, 2017), including that of the vocational field, the schools and individual teachers. Our results confirm that teachers individual, social, cultural and material resources such as competence, career stage, relations and networks, school leadership and prevailing culture at schools have their role in enabling or hindering the agency of teachers.