Editorial

In her editorial of Teachers and Teaching: Theory and Practice (Rust, 2013), Frances O’Connell Rust entitled her introduction to the volume ‘Teaching: Outside-in/inside-out’. Quoting Cochran-Smith and Lytle (1993) she stressed the value of looking deeply at teachers through the eyes of the teachers. The seven research papers in this volume from Ireland, Iran, Belgium, Finland, Australia, US, and Vietnam present multiple perspectives on ‘inside-out/ outside-in’ dimensions of teachers and teaching. The papers dealing with ‘Inside-out perspectives’ focus on how the (inner) world of teachers, revealed through their professional identity construction, their levels of moral reasoning, their expressions of anxiety and perfectionism and their perceptions of maintaining face as educators, manifests itself in their distinctive (outer) social–professional contexts. We are exposed to teacher educators’ traditional and more progressive views of the place of ‘face’ in Vietnamese education and its implications for teachers’ daily work as educators at school. We are also introduced to the moral reasoning process of Irish student teachers and how it affects their perceptions of practices; to the positive and negative effects of perfectionism on the psychological states of Iranian EFL teachers’ anxiety; and to how in-service teachers’ self-constructed metaphors reflect their understandings of their roles, obligations, and assumptions about teaching and learning. Papers dealing with ‘outside-in perspectives’ focus on (outside) educational policy reforms and pedagogical practices and how they affect the way in which teachers view and construct their (inner) selves and work. These studies attend to issues related to external teacher evaluation and feedback and how teachers respond to such evaluation in their organizational contexts; to the implementation of innovative pedagogies in teacher education; and to the design of embodied knowledge practices in teacher education geared to promoting student teacher learning. We are introduced, for example, to how teachers in secondary education in Belgium respond and react to feedback and external evaluation policy implemented in Flemish secondary schools; to the effects of a teacher education framework that prepares prospective teachers to twenty-first century learning practices, and to the impact of a practice-based intervention model designed around embodied practices of reading aloud on student teacher learning in pre-service teacher education.

‘Outside-in’ dimensions of teachers and teaching

Situated in secondary education in Flanders, Belgium, Melissa Tuytens and Geert Devos’s paper, entitled ‘The role of feedback from the school leader during teacher evaluation for teacher and school improvement’, examines the role of feedback from the school leader during teacher evaluation. The qualitative study looks into how feedback with school leaders affects teachers’ practices at school, underscoring the importance of certain school organizational characteristics for how such feedback is positively used by teachers to further school improvement. The study was designed with the background of teacher evaluation policy implemented in Flemish secondary schools, which obliges secondary schools in Flanders to formally evaluate all their teachers every four years. Being one of the first empirical studies on feedback from teacher evaluation processes as it relates to the broader school organization, the study identifies connections between feedback with particular teachers and school organizational characteristics such as teacher participation, shared vision, collaboration and professional learning.

Their findings point to the direct influence of the school leader in shaping the schools’ organizational characteristics, affecting teachers’ reactions and practices. An interesting finding pertains to the fact that principals resort to other organizational characteristics such as teacher collaboration in subject departments and the provision of professional learning opportunities. To this end, the authors stress the embeddedness of school organizational characteristics for positively responding to feedback toward class and school improvement. Thus, they propose an image of the school leader both as an instructional and transformational leader who can create an atmosphere of collaboration within a safe space for teachers to provide and receive feedback and be open to evaluation. The study points to several practical implications for schools such as developing awareness of the importance of the context of teacher evaluation and integrating evaluation with other school organizational processes. It also points to the importance of feedback for the motivation and commitment of teachers, underscoring the value of acknowledging and appreciating teacher accomplishments. Another practical implication deals with training school leaders to maximize the potential of the school organizational characteristics for supporting teachers in order to positively respond to feedback and improve their practice.

In their article, ‘Preparing teacher students for 21st century learning practices: A framework for enhancing collaborative problem solving and strategic learning skills’, Päivi Häkkinen, Sanna Järvelä, Kati Mäkitalo-Siegl, Arto Ahonen, Piia Näykki and Teemu Valtonen, from Finland, present a pedagogical framework for the twenty-first century learning practices in teacher education. Grounded in a socio-cognitive model of learning, they emphasize learning as a complex metacognitive and social process involving adaptive thinking, motivation, emotion and behavior. Thus, learners are viewed as active agents who can take control of their own learning processes, but also facilitate the learning of others. The authors claim that teacher education practices do not match the needs of the twenty-first century collaborative inquiry-based learning environments that integrate social media, wikis, blogs and mobile technology. Thus, they attempt the ambitious task of developing a theory-based pedagogical framework that attends to these aspects, in an effort to promote pre-service teachers’ twenty-first century learning skills.

The authors present concrete applications of training pre-service teachers to develop’ twenty-first century skills, discussing recent policy frameworks that focus on collaborative problem solving and strategic learning skills in the context of teacher education. Questions related to scaling up inquiry-based, collaborative approaches into policy implementation at systemic levels are raised, as well as a proposed empirically tested knowledge agenda for examining the effects of their framework on collaborative problem solving and socially shared regulation.

‘(Re)Turning to Practice in Teacher Education: Embodied Knowledge in Learning to Teach’, by Donna Mathewson Mitchell and Jo-Anne Reid from New South Wales, Australia, assesses the impact of a theoretically informed practice-based intervention model in pre-service education on student learning. The study was designed around the core practice of reading aloud to primary school children along with text questioning. Specifically, it examined the effect of the experience on pre-service teachers, through observation, self-report and cohort comparison of teachers’ assessments with those of students in previous years. The authors argue for the value of engaging student teachers in pedagogies of enactment, which focus on observation of and reflection on teaching as embodied practice. In this orientation, they develop an approach which integrates a variety of forms of teaching practice that stress embodied practices, such as encouraging student teachers to observe and reflect on how and why expert teachers move, speak, arrange and use their body in relation to the socio-material elements of the teaching space.

‘Inside-out’ dimensions of teachers and teaching

In their paper entitled ‘Irish student teachers’ levels of moral reasoning: context, comparisons, and contributing influences’, Joanne O’Flaherty and Jim Gleeson discuss the importance of teachers’ capacity to make sound moral judgments that reflect their level of moral reasoning on their professional practice. The paper presents a longitudinal study of a full cohort of undergraduate student teachers’ level of moral reasoning over the course of their four-year concurrent program in an Irish university. Drawing on the measurement of moral reasoning based on the Defining Issues Test (DIT 2), the paper discusses how the measurement was used to track the levels of moral reasoning of Irish student teachers as they progressed through university and as they compared with students from other faculties in the same university. An interesting finding reported is that Irish student teachers performed better on the DIT than peers from other disciplines and also better than their student teacher peers in other countries.

Arguing that the Irish teachers are found to be less supportive of constructivist teaching and more inclined toward transmission-based models of instruction, the authors recognize the importance of espousing critically reflective approaches to teacher education which stress the development of moral reasoning and student teachers’ activism in issues related to social inclusion and equity. Such an approach, they contend, is in tune with Ireland’s recent development of a code of professional practice, which underscores honesty, reliability and moral action as embedded in the ethical standards of teaching, knowledge, skill, and competence. The authors point to several important challenges for education policy-makers such as protection of the high status of teaching as a career against the background of austerity measures and of incursion of new public management into initial teacher education policy and practice. To this end, they call on supporting a strong teacher union that resists reforms that promote reductionist agendas of teaching to the test.

Situated in the Vietnamese Higher Education context, ‘Maintaining teachers’ face in the context of change: Results from a study of Vietnamese college lecturers’ perceptions of face’, by Thi Quynh Trang Nguyen, examines college lecturers’ perceptions of face, which is defined as a person’s public self-image of approved social attributes. According to this definition, then, people preserve their face by behaving in compliance with what is considered appropriate by their society. The authors begin by describing the importance of saving face as a mechanism of social control in Vietnamese society, which, in turn, bears a strong influence on the professional behavior of teachers. Fifteen lecturers at a teacher training college were interviewed in order to discern connections between their concepts of face and their beliefs about good teaching and about maintaining face in teaching. The paper discusses teacher educators’ ideas about the elements that comprise their face, how they maintain their face in professional contexts, and how these processes relate to their evaluations of innovations in teaching and learning. The findings expose teacher educators’ uncertainties and diverse perspectives regarding the value of traditional professional wisdom and the place of face in a changing society, reflecting the challenges to the status and practices of traditional education. The findings also point to the strong tendency among teacher educators to voice their perception of the noble character of teachers’ social position, the unarguable nature of their knowledge and the need to preserve this conservative appearance and behavior in public. These perceptions, they contend, drive teachers’ standards of saving face in classrooms, reinforcing a traditional teacher-centered teaching practice, which stands in contrast with recent reforms geared to pedagogical innovation. At the same time, however, findings also point to a gradual move on the part of several teachers toward a view of face and, consequently, of teaching which moves away from radical Confucian ideologies. The authors suggest that policy-makers pay more attention to how the ingrained concepts of face and saving face in Vietnamese society can be developed to recognize that a legitimate component of teachers’ face is the acceptance of innovation at classroom level. This implies fostering teacher agency and innovative teaching practices that move away from traditional Confucian rote-learning teacher-centered models of education, toward western models of interactive student-centered education.

In the paper entitled ‘The Effect of Perfectionism on Burnout among English Language Teachers: The Mediating Role of Anxiety’, Masoud Mahmoodi-Shahrebabaki examines the positive and negative effects of perfectionism on the psychological states of EFL teachers’ anxiety and on their burnout levels. The study, conducted in the context of 276 Iranian EFL teachers focuses on the complexity of EFL teaching in language classrooms where most teachers are not native speakers of English (as in the case of Iran). Such a context constitutes a strong potential source of teacher burnout and for even leaving the profession. With these concerns in mind, the study explores the mediating effect of anxiety on the causal relations between perfectionism and teacher burnout, in an attempt to suggest a model that examines the mediating effect of anxiety on the relationship between perfectionism and burnout components. The study underscores the significance of teacher personality traits and calls for developing effective strategies that enhance teachers’ personal development. They suggest, for example, training teachers to lessen and control anxiety and perfectionism which can lead to negative effects and burnout. Policy-makers, thus, need to revamp the support system that schools and districts offer to those teachers who are at the risk of burnout and suffer from anxiety.

In their paper ‘Consequences of personal teaching metaphors for teacher identity and practice’, Lynnette B. Erickson and Stefinee Pinnegar, from the US, explore how in-service teachers’ self-constructed metaphors reflect their understandings of their roles, obligations, and assumptions about teaching and learning. Drawing on the power of teachers’ metaphors to make explicit the intuitive knowledge that they hold about themselves and their classrooms, the authors highlight the variability in teacher identity plotlines, obligations, roles, and assumptions as well as common discourses across the metaphors. The study suggests that teachers’ metaphors can be positioned along a continuum of diverse attributions from teacher as gardener, traveler, Queen of England, and butterfly. Interestingly, as the authors suggest, it is this variability that accounts for how differences in metaphors have the potential to result in differences in teaching. At the same time, however, the metaphors reveal shared understandings related to the obligations, duties, responsibilities, and roles of teachers such as nurturing and caring. The individual and cross-case analysis underscore the unique value of working with metaphors in teacher education for gaining insight into the assumptions that teachers, teacher educators, school leaders, and policy-makers hold about teachers, teaching and learning. These understandings can be used as a starting point for assisting them in their work and professional development. As the authors contend, analyzing teacher-constructed metaphors can provide teacher educators insight into the kinds of moral and ethical commitments that teachers make and enact. The diverse forms and meanings that teachers’ metaphors take also underscore the complex and varied world of teaching, cautioning us of policies that advocate uniformity and one-size-fits-all practices.

The dynamic relationships between inside-out/outside-in perspectives on the study of teachers and teaching reflect the era of ‘fluidity’ (Bauman, 2000), globalization and rapid change that we live in, bearing direct influence on the active and ever-changing character of teachers’ inner and outer worlds in their social–professional contexts. As James Gee (2001) puts it:

human beings act and interact in a given context, others recognize that person as acting and interacting as a certain ‘kind of person’ or even as several different ‘kinds’ at once … The ‘kind of person’ one is recognized as ‘being’, at a given time and place, can change from moment to moment in the interaction, can change from context to context, and, of course, can be ambiguous or unstable. (p. 99)

Drawing on diverse inquiry frameworks and methodologies, the seven papers in this volume empirically examine and discuss manifold interactions between teacher-as-person (inside perspectives) and teaching- as-context (outside perspectives) as embedded and manifested in a particular educational setting and culture.

Lily Orland-Barak
University of Haifa, Israel
[email protected]