Teacher Power and Gender in the Classroom Discourse of EFL Teacher Educators: Insights from a case study

How Teacher Power (TP) is exerted impacts affective learning and class participation. This mixed-method case-study research explores TP and the role of gender in a Libyan EFL Teacher Education context. Classroom discourse is analysed to determine the scale of Teacher Power Strategies (TPS) manipulated by both male and female educators with respect to Pro-social Teacher Power (PTP) and Anti-social Teacher Power (ATP). Six teacher educators (three males and three females) have been observed over 18 lectures involving 47 second-semester students. How the student teachers perceive and react to TP is explored through focus group interviews. The findings reveal interesting gender differences in the application of anti and pro-social power; the males’ TP ratio (2.3:1) is much greater than the females’ (1.5:1) who display far less ATP, e.g. command power, with zero criticism and zero coercion; PTP is distinguished by politeness and compliment; “command softening”, mitigated power and lowered anxiety. The students tolerate teachers’ command, interruption, questioning for pedagogic reasons; cases of unwarranted coercion and unconstructive criticism are met with silent protest. In conclusion, a balance of power is deemed essential in fostering students’ well-being, promoting a relaxed stress-free atmosphere, and facilitating active student participation.

The important risk-taking of advocating for student partnership practice

This opinion piece is a call to action for all higher education teachers engaged in partnership practice to consider themselves advocates, reluctant or willing, for a partnership approach in higher education, reluctant or willing. By sharing my lived experience of partnership, I highlight some of the considerations facing teachers who are resisting the ‘how we do things’ pressures that reproduce existing learner-teacher power structures and cause tensions between colleagues. However, I argue that without teachers as drivers, partnership practice will remain an idealist goal experienced by few.

Telling Small Stories With Power Point As Video In Lockdown

The 2020 pandemic and ensuing lockdowns came as a shock nationally and internationally. As a result, the change in approaches to teaching for many was fast and absolute. One minute the face-to-face ethos was humming along as 'normal', the next it was fully on line and taking teachers and students into a story many would never have considered. This brought with it the challenge of continuing to build and maintain relationships with the students in order to support their road to success. Storytelling has always been an important part of my practice in developing relationships through sharing my own experiences and encouraging the students to share theirs. In this way, we co-construct understanding of the class content and get to know each other. Going into fully online teaching would potentially change this. Given the speed of the changes required, this project was never meant to be overtly innovative but was designed to allow me to continue using narratives of content and practice to build communities of learning in the online environment. As a teacher, Power Point was familiar, so I started there and simply changed to saving them as mp4 files. The presentation plots this journey as a teacher taking storytelling from a face-to-face classroom across the lockdown in a way that continued supporting relationships and learning. The first attempts showed me that online stories are not the same as class power points where I physically created the narrative that linked the slides together. As I viewed my first attempt, it became clear that I was trying to tell a story that was in my head but not translated to the screen and I needed to adopt an approach that clearly spoke to a listener/audience i.e. my community of learning. I learned that, up to this point, I had used power point as a guide as I wove a story around the weekly content in a face-to-face classroom. In other words, the whole thing was heavily dependent on me. In this new environment, the story had to be told in a different way. It had to stand as a discrete artefact on its own, speaking to anyone that logged on, enabling me to reach out to that other human being without the unique connection that develops between story-teller and listener in the face to face world. Through three more cycles of research, I found that this new kind of story depended on a delicate balance between visual and oral, the context, content and the affective and how each was portrayed. Ultimately, the focus had to remain on the relationships I could build and the impact they could have. Therefore, this project came to be about keeping storytelling, whether face-to-face or online, “a uniquely human experience through which people make sense of past experience, convey emotions and ultimately connect with each other” (Christianson, 2011, p. 289).

Representasi Kekuasaan pada Bentuk Gramatikal Tindak Tutur Guru dalam Pembelajaran Bahasa Indonesia (Power Representation in the Grammatical Form of Teacher’s Speech Acts in Indonesian Language Learning)

Penelitian ini termasuk penelitian pragmatis kritis yang bertujuan untuk mendeskripsikan bagaimana representasi kekuasaan pada bentuk gramatikal tindak tutur guru dalam pembelajaran bahasa Indonesia di SMP Negeri 4 Pandak. Jenis penelitian ini adalah penelitian kualitatif dengan metode analisis isi. Sumber data penelitian ini berupa tuturan guru selama pembelajaran bahasa Indonesia, sedangkan data penelitian ini berupa representasi kekuasaan yang terdapat pada tindak tutur guru saat proses kegiatan pembelajaran bahasa Indonesia. Hasil penelitian menunjukkan bahwa representasi kekuasaan guru ditunjukkan melalui penggunaan (1) kalimat positif-negatif, (2) modus kalimat, (3) modalitas, dan (4) pronomina persona.Kata kunci: representasi, kekuasaan, bentuk gramatikal, tindak tuturABSTRACTThis research includes critical pragmatic research, which aims to describe how the representation of power in the grammatical form of teacher speech acts in learning Indonesian in Pandak 4 Public Middle School. This type of research is qualitative research with content analysis methods. The source of this research data is in the form of teacher speech during Indonesian language learning, while the research data is in the form of representation of power contained in teacher speech acts during the process of learning Indonesian. The results of the study show that the representation of teacher power is shown through the use of (1) positive-negative sentences, (2) mode of sentences, (3) modalities, and (4) personal pronouns.

Balancing teacher power and children’s rights: rethinking the use of picturebooks in multicultural primary schools in England

This article offers an autoethnographic reconsideration of a primary school teacher’s practice and children’s interpretation of picturebooks in multicultural primary schools in England. It considers the balance teachers strike between respecting children’s rights to freedom of thought and expression, and wielding their own power as directors of learning. It links key aspects of international human rights law on children to concepts from literacy studies and multicultural children’s literature: representation of minority groups, pictorial interpretation, critical literacy and teacher power. It brings out nuanced interpretations of the picturebook The Arrival as a ‘mirror’ for learners from migrant backgrounds. This mirror may reflect children’s experiences but also offer a frosted, distorted or blank view where young learners do not empathise with characters. We argue that children’s rights within education should include freedom of thought and expression and freedom to interpret literature; teachers should reflect on their intentions when using literature, and not pose barriers to this freedom.

Teacher Power and the Politics of Union Organizing in the Charter Sector

Despite the growing media attention paid to charter-school unions, comparatively little empirical research exists. Drawing on interview data from two cities (Detroit, MI, and New Orleans, LA), our exploratory study examined charter-school teachers’ motivations for organizing, the political and power dimensions, and the framing of unions by both teachers and administrations. We found that improving teacher retention, and thus school stability, was a central motivation for teacher organizers, whereas, simultaneously, high teacher turnover stymied union drives. We also found that charter administrators reacted with severity to nascent unionization drives, harnessing school-as-family metaphors and at-will contracts to prevent union formation. As the charter sector continues to grow, understanding why teachers want unions and how those unions differ from traditional public school unions is crucial to analyzing the long-term viability of these schools and the career trajectories of the teachers who work in them.