Life Of Teachers Research Articles

Pre-service Science and Mathematics Teachers' Thoughts about Technology

This study aims to investigate pre-service teachers' opinions about the technology. In this respect, the opinions of pre-service science and mathematics teachers were taken. The study was carried out at a university, located in the capital of Turkey. The data were collected from 20 pre-service teachers in the department of secondary school science and mathematics education. Criterion sampling was used. Interview form was developed to collect data. The results were presented in four themes: the role of technology in pre-service teacher's life, pre-service teachers' preferences about technology, pre-service teachers' technology competence, and pre-service teachers' opinions about use of technology in educational settings. It is expected that the results of the study will contribute to the revision of teacher education programs in terms of technology use and cultivate the learning environment by using technology more effectively.

Instrument Teacher's Narrative Identity and Professional Growth

The purpose of the study was to discover the dynamics of a music educator's identity formation and the preconditions of professional growth in her life. The music educator's profession was described through her stories and beliefs.First, the research task was to determine when and why individual/social sources of self were successful (dominant) at particular times in her life. Second, the task was to determine when and why certain changes in her life occurred. The instrument teacher had worked at different music institutes and had recently retired.The data has been collected through an episodic, in depth-interview. The data consists of meaningful episodes in the teacher's life and her beliefs on different themes in this study. The data analysis strategies included paradigmatic analysis of narratives and narrative analysis.According to the results, the success of instrument teacher's sources of individual/social selves was defined by her efforts to achieve harmony. Aspirations to achieve integrity arise from the need to define oneself. Thus, answering the question who a person is requires individual/social definitions. According to this study, progression in her professional growth is a maturing process. First, it involved getting to know herself, second, committing to herself and finally achieving autonomy. The instrument teacher's profession is characterized by a relationship between personas. According to her story, instrument teaching is a lifelong preoccupation.

Taking Teaching as a Calling

Successful teaching experience and outcome is often dependent upon the teacher's personal charisma which includes the qualities of a sense of humor, friendliness, forgiving, understanding, caring, patience, and so on. A critical link to all these positive characteristics is that the teacher feels a deep sense of gratitude on a daily basis. This article reports on studies from the field of positive psychology that focus on grateful affect and grateful expression. As far as teaching is concerned, it reveals that gratitude is one of the most obvious positive emotions to flourish a teacher's life and career. In practice, some tools of cultivating gratitude for a teacher are introduced such as staying away from mass media, keeping a gratitude journal and keeping a gratitude reminder. It is hoped that through practice, teachers in their daily teaching experience can tune their feelings to the grateful channel and arrive at the level where teaching becomes a calling in their life.

History as Rhetoric, Fable, and Literary Genre

This article provides an insight into the notion of history as a literary genre. It argues that in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries the concept of “history” was mostly employed in its plural form: “the stories” and not “history” were the predominant form of the concept of history. These “stories” were related to the ancient Ciceronian rhetorical and moral tradition of history as Magistra Vitae (history as life's teacher) and were considered part of the so-called belles-lettres or “literature”.

Millennial Teacher: A Storied Landscape of Diversity in “New Times”

In this article the authors explore the ways in which the historical location of millennial prospective teachers is markedly distinct from that of previous generations. Through a case study of one prospective teacher's life history, millenial themes of globalization and shape-shifting are highlighted and analyzed in relation to one prospective teacher's learner biography.

Understanding narrative relations in teacher education

The use of stories in teacher education is ubiquitous; yet, the question regarding how stories help teachers make sense of their professional lives is more complex than it first appears. The authors draw from Adriana Cavarero's understanding of narrative relations as the political site where one's unique singularity is revealed in the desire to have one's story told. They compare her insights to Judith Butler's resignification of injurious speech, examining both positions as they apply to a beginning teacher's efforts to become the professional she admires. It is suggested to teacher educators that they use stories from practice to foreground the tension between a teacher's life and her life-story. By understanding the irresolvable tension of desire to have one's story told, a teacher has a better chance of recognising her own vulnerability and that of her students, and of teaching at the starting place of ethics.

Pedagogical Acts

This article argues that academic autobiographies should be viewed through the lens of pedagogy, and applies this new perspective to texts by Jane Tompkins and Alice Kaplan. In different ways, these two texts illustrate the relational nature of teaching, the way in which interactions with students shape a teacher's practice and demonstrate that the writing of a teaching autobiography, like teaching itself, is a many-layered, collaborative process. By highlighting the textual sites in which students enter into the autobiographies, I show that although Kaplan and Tompkins disclose very little about their students as individuals, their students are integral components of their attempts to make meaning of the act of teaching by writing the teacher's life. Furthermore, I suggest that the devaluation of teaching in academia allows these authors to take risks and admit failure in their depictions of teaching.

Osler Under 40

Osler Under 40

Caring for students: Pedagogy and professionalism in an age of anxiety

University teachers are strongly motivated by the care they feel for their students. Yet today, many are frustrated. On the one hand, it is becoming harder to teach well, as more diverse student populations, new media, and new educational priorities challenge conventional pedagogical postures and styles. On the other hand, teachers are wary of calls for greater pedagogical professionalism in an increasingly managed and de-motivating professional environment. This essay examines two movements in the United States that attempt to sustain teachers' motivation by rethinking what caring for students requires them to do. The first, a call for a “scholarship of teaching and learning,” directs the professor's attention outward, towards inquiry into their students' learning; the second directs attention inwards, encouraging exploration of “the inner landscape of a teacher's life.” While both movements oppose a narrow view of pedagogy as simply technique, they address the challenge of caring for students in different ways and point to resolutions that appear to have different potential to alter the teaching environment itself. These tensions around teaching inscribe in higher education wider debates about the value of the professions, the nature of expert practice, and how to recover and ensure professionals' capacity for care.

Looking through the lens of a teacher's life: The power of prototypical stories in understanding teachers' instructional decisions in mathematics

The focus of this narrative inquiry was to examine how teachers describe influences on their instructional decisions in mathematics. Using a lens provided by pivotal or prototypical stories teachers told about their past experiences, connections were suggested between these past experiences and their instructional decisions. These connections helped to illustrate how instructional decisions may be shaped by priorities and beliefs established earlier in life, as well as by current contexts. Further research on the use and characteristics of prototypical stories is suggested.

Christian women and men from Durban: peer sex educators in the making

In HIV and AIDS and life skills education in southern Africa peer education has been advocated as a way of democratizing relations between educators and students and encouraging participatory pedagogies. But what makes a peer educator, or rather how do people make themselves peer educators? Similarities in terms of age, social status and background do not automatically result in teachers and students identifying as peers and engaging in participatory teaching and learning. This paper focuses on an interview with men and women in their 20s who were identified as peer educators and taught life skills education to children in a ‘black’ high school. How did they, as full‐time paid employees several years older than their students working for a Christian organization, construct themselves as peers in relation to the male and female students they taught? It is argued that this involved contradictory ways of relating to students, moralistic and student‐centred, and that they subverted and reproduced conventional gendered identities.

What They're Reading: The Courage to Teach: Exploring the Inner Landscape of a Teacher's Life by Parker J. Palmer

With this book, Parker Palmer erects an important landmark for all who practice the art of teaching and for anyone concerned with education today. In an educational landscape riddled with deliberations on general education reform, pedagogical approaches, and student needs, Palmer's essential point is that good teaching cannot be reduced to technique because "good teaching comes from the identity and integrity of the teacher" (10). Good teaching, he contends, is a courageous act that results both from the teacher's intimate relation with the subject matter as well as the teacher's humility and openness to discover and learn. Learning for both teacher and student, then, is also a courageous act, for teacher and student alike must be willing to confront "great things" together that cannot be reduced to the lowest common denominator of any single perspective of an individual or group. W

The Courage to Teach: Exploring the Inner Landscape of a Teacher's Life

The Courage to Teach: Exploring the Inner Landscape of a Teacher's Life

Munazza's story: Shedding light on a science teacher's conceptions of the nature of science through a life history study

Abstract Life history research creates a broader understanding of teaching by providing illustration of the relationships among various aspects of teachers’ lives and their teaching practice, both inside and beyond the classroom. This article focuses on the life history of Munazza, a young science teacher at the Karachi Model Secondary School (KMSS), a private, co‐educational, English‐medium school for children from middle‐income families. Its purpose is to gain insight into a female science teacher's understanding of teaching science in a school in Pakistan, ascertain what aspects of this science teacher's conceptions of the nature of science are explicit in her practice, and determine how the teacher's life history has affected those views.

Resource ReviewsThe Courage to Teach: Exploring the Inner Landscape of a Teacher's Life, by Palmer Parker J. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 1998. 199 pages, hard cover.

Resource ReviewsThe Courage to Teach: Exploring the Inner Landscape of a Teacher's Life, by Palmer Parker J. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 1998. 199 pages, hard cover.

Teacher's Life Worlds, Agency and Policy Contexts

Life history studies of teachers have remained a sadly neglected genre and have only recently become strongly developed in many countries. In 2000, the authors began a collaboration to develop life and work history research with a group of teachers who, 40 years earlier, had been pioneers of the Swedish 9-year compulsory school reform. The present paper describes interesting differences between British and Swedish research and school policy raises questions about the professional development of teachers in contexts of increasing marketisation of public service. The study connects directly to Michael Huberman's life cycle work and emphasises a close and egalitarian collaboration between the researchers and the teachers in the scholarly process.

Germain, Martha Hawkes. Worldly Teachers: Cultural Learning and Pedagogy.

When I first picked up Worldly Teachers, I had just finished teaching a summer course in a MA-TESOL program in southern Brazil, and had just begun a year of teaching undergraduate courses in Communication and Media Studies in Madrid, Spain. Not surprisingly, I found the book fascinating and useful. Martha Hawkes Germain writes about six veteran U.S. teachers who have studied about, taught, and lived abroad, arguing that intensive international experience profoundly affects a teacher's life and work. She includes reflections about culture shock, friendships across borders, fundamental personal transformation, pedagogical issues, and school reform. It is a valuable book for any teacher who has had or hopes to have a similar experience.

Casting a Wide Net: Reflections on Identity, Integrity, and Community in Physical Therapy Education

At the Annual Conference of the American Physical Therapy Association in June 2002, physical therapy educator after physical therapy educator made their way to the platform and podium to receive the Association's highest honors and awards. These educators were recognized for significant and enduring contributions to the profession of physical therapy, the APTA, and just as important, the lives of individuals whom they have touched-students, patients, and colleagues. Time and time again, as these honorees accepted their awards, they recognized the influence and contributions of other physical therapy educators-their former teachers and mentors-to the course and nature of their own professional development and career. As I sat in the huge audience, I was fortunate to sit next to a current student of one of the award recipients excitedly and proudly informed me that the individual being recognized was ... one of my teachers and she is wonderful. She really deserves this award! The experience of listening to this multigenerational legacy of and learning made me think about how physical therapy educators, be they clinical or academic teachers, cast a wide net. Each of the students we work with will, for the most part, go on to care for hundreds or thousands of patients in the course of their career and will become in some way part of the educational continuum, be it with patients and family members, future students, or other colleagues and professionals. We are teachers of teachers. And our goes well beyond subject matter and method. These ruminations led me to recall and reflect on the work of Parker J Palmer. In his book, The Courage to Teach: Exploring the Inner Landscape of a Teacher's Life,1 Palmer reminds us that there are several important questions we must ask about when teaching and learning are the goals. He points out that we often ask questions about what we should teach, how we should teach, and why we teach (toward what aim?). Less often we ask what he calls the who question-who is the self that teaches?1(p4) As the title of his book suggests, Palmer goes on to explore various dimensions of what he calls the inner landscape of the self1(p4) and asserts that cannot be reduced to technique; good comes from the identity and integrity of the teacher.1(p10) Furthermore, he suggests that good teachers are gifted builders of connections. They have a strong sense of self and are connected with that self while they are also connected with their students, their subject matter, pedagogical methods, and colleagues, and they are actively engaged in communities that provide a venue for ongoing, open dialogue and development of self, others, and their profession. …

The Courage to Teach (review article)

THIS ARTICLE IS an extended review of Parker J. Palmer's latest book, The Courage to Teach: Exploring the Inner Landscape of a Teacher's Life. 2 The contents of the book are surveyed, significant themes for Christian educators are identified and a few critical concerns and lingering questions are raised.

Book Review: Questions about God: A Guide for A/AS Level Students

THIS ARTICLE IS an extended review of Parker J. Palmer's latest book, The Courage to Teach: Exploring the Inner Landscape of a Teacher's Life. The contents of the book are surveyed, significant the...