Empowering Educators

Proven Principles and Successful Strategies

Patrick Alan Danaher,Karen Noble,Kevin M. Larkin,Marta Kawka,Henriette van Rensburg,Lyn Brodie,Kenneth A. Loparo

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781137515896
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education Theory & Practice

Educators cannot empower their students without being empowered themselves. This book presents a number of proven principles and successful strategies that have been demonstrated by rigorous research to be effective in assisting teachers to carry out their fundamental mission of helping their students to achieve significant learning outcomes.

1

Empowering Educators: Promoting Enabling Teaching and Learning in Research and Practice

Kevin Larkin, Marta Kawka, Karen Noble, Henriette van Rensburg, Lyn Brodie and Patrick Alan Danaher

Introduction

An abiding ambivalence attends the work and identities of contemporary educators. On the one hand, few informed and well-disposed commentators would doubt the importance of teaching and its transformative potential, encapsulated in representations of the teaching profession both in films (Ellsmore, 2005) and in novels (Carr, 1984). On the other hand, teachers are seen as increasingly pressured and under threat, including through (albeit often reluctant) complicity with high-stakes standardised testing (Au, 2011), responding to individual accountability and school league tables (Perryman, Ball, Maguire, & Braun, 2011), engaging with school leaders who have varying degrees of competency (Tschannen-Moran, 2014) and sometimes experiencing feelings of not belonging at school and of emotional exhaustion (Skaalvik & Skaalvik, 2011).

All of this accentuates both the urgency of, and the value in, analysing the broader contexts framing the work and identities of contemporary educators and also of articulating the principles and strategies that can facilitate more positive and productive outcomes for teachers as these contribute directly to their empowerment. Doing so is important in its own right for members of a crucial yet often undervalued profession, and can also strengthen educators’ capacities to empower their students, thereby enacting the parallel meanings of empowering educators, which is the core theoretical underpinning of this book.

The authors of this chapter take up this dual focus on empowering educators (as simultaneously increasing the resources and support available to teachers and assisting them to work with their students even more effectively) through a carefully targeted distillation of key findings from contemporary scholarship about teachers and teaching. This scholarship traverses the formally constituted sectors in which educators work (preschool, primary, secondary and tertiary) as well as the informal spaces (coaching and youth work) that many of them occupy to build collegiality and to nourish their spirits, enabling them to fulfil the competing expectations held for their work by governments, communities and employers. On the basis of this scholarship, the authors evince grounds for cautious optimism in the crucial project of empowering educators, provided that the agency and responsibility of individual teachers are not overwhelmed by wider structural forces and contradictory pressures.

The chapter is divided into the following two sections:

• Current scholarship regarding empowering educators and their students; and
• The book’s rationale, structure and contributions to extending current understandings of empowering educators.

Current scholarship regarding empowering educators and their students

A considerable body of research attends the work and identities of contemporary teachers. Such identities have been conceptualised in terms of concepts like dialogical self (Akkerman & Meijer, 2011), politicised professionalism (Mockler, 2011), teachers’ voice (Sutherland, Howard, & Markauskaite, 2010), multiple notions of agency (Lipponen & Kumpulainen, 2011), occupational and organisational professionalism (Löfgren, 2014) and the utility of metaphor in helping teachers to articulate specific professional identities (Thomas & Beauchamp, 2011), with such professional identities being composed of job satisfaction, self-efficacy, occupational commitment and change to motivation (Canrinus, Helms-Lorenz, Beijaard, Buitink, & Hofman, 2011). Despite their diversity, these theoretical perspectives derive from researchers’ shared assumptions regarding the complexity, materiality and situatedness of the terrains in which educators work and in which they seek to enhance their students’ life chances.

These same characteristics are evident in the diverse ways that contemporary educators understand their students’ worlds. For instance, proponents of the notion of funds of knowledge (González, Moll, & Amanti, 2005) eschew deficit views of their students’ knowledge and instead strive to incorporate students’ often rich extracurricular lives into formal learning experiences. Similarly, empowering educators take seriously the proposition of the differentiated classroom (Tomlinson, 2014), whereby everyone involved in the educational partnership – including learners, teachers, families and community members – has a significant responsibility for the multifaceted support needed to facilitate long-term learning outcomes. Moreover, culturally responsive teaching (Gay, 2010) is predicated on students’ multiple and often inequitably constructed and positioned sociocultural backgrounds exercising a profound influence on their learning opportunities that empowering educators must work hard to maximise.

Likewise, many educators and education researchers reinforce the value of highly diverse pedagogical approaches whose mobilisation reflects teachers’ capacities to empower their students and subsequently enhance their own sense of empowerment as capable and effective educators. These approaches include the design of emergent learning tasks (Kawka, Larkin, & Danaher, 2011, 2012) such as using Learning Circles to maximise students’ social integration and support between their home lives and their studies (Noble & Henderson, 2008, 2011), developing authentic linguistic spaces when engaged in language teaching and learning (Hatoss, van Rensburg, & Starks, 2011) and generating and sustaining productive student teams in online learning environments (Brodie, 2011). It is important that the diversity of pedagogical approaches used by educators matches the diversity and aspirations of their students.

More broadly, the importance of this double diversity, and its accompanying complexity, were synthesised in Hattie’s (2009) distillation of the ongoing interdependence of teaching and learning for educators and students:

[T]he art of teaching reaches its epitome of success after the lesson has been structured, after the content has been delivered, and after the classroom has been organized. The art of teaching, and its major successes, relate to ‘what happens next’ – the manner in which the teacher reacts to how the student interprets, accommodates, rejects, and/or reinvents the content and skills, how the student relates and applies the content to other tasks, and how the student reacts in light of success and failure apropos the content and methods that the teacher has taught. Learning is spontaneous, individualistic, and often earned through effort. It is a timeworn, slow and gradual, fits-and-starts kind of process, which can have a flow of its own, but requires passion, patience, and attention to detail (from the teacher and student). (pp. 1–2)

Against the backdrop of this enduringly significant interplay between teachers and students, the work and identities of contemporary educators need to be understood as constrained, and yet also enabled, by the respective contexts in which they enacted their responsibilities. Teachers’ subjectivities have been influenced by the emergence of widely ranging themes. For instance, the long-running research project Variations in Teachers’ Work, Lives and Effectiveness (VITAE) highlighted the emotional dimension of teaching and its impact on teachers’ uncertain professional identities in the United Kingdom (Day, 2011). Those identities have also been situated in the deeply ingrained conflict between schools as instruments of neoliberalism and as sites of alternative ways of facilitating learning (Wrigley, Lingard, & Thomson, 2012). On the one hand, this conflict can be viewed as placing an additional and heavy burden on already overstretched teachers; on the other hand, it can be understood as a crucial element of the terrains of their professional work. As one illustration of such a conflict and its attendant complexities, school self-evaluation in a sample of schools in the English Midlands was found to be linked inextricably with deeper themes of ‘issues of compliance and resistance, teacher motivation and behaviours, understandings of professionalism and leadership, school ethos, job satisfaction, and the use and interpretation of school level data in relation to school self evaluation’ (Hall & Noyes, 2009, p. 311).

One particular subset of the literature concerning contemporary educators and the dual project of empowering them and helping them to empower their students is focused on the highly differentiated and often contentious situation of teachers working with learners who are variously constructed as ‘marginalised’ (see also Danaher, Cook, Danaher, Coombes, & Danaher, 2013). This situation was explored in a special theme issue (Anteliz, Coombes, & Danaher, 2006a) of the academic journal Teaching and Teacher Education that investigated the impact on educators of teaching such students, and whether and how doing so might construct those educators as ‘marginalised pedagogues’ (Anteliz et al., 2006a):

Given that ‘difference’ often shades into ‘deficit’ and ‘discrimination’, it is necessary to consider the extent to which educators teaching these learners see themselves as ‘marginalised’ – and/or perhaps as ‘privileged’ to be working with these learners, as ‘innovators’ because they are away from the surveillance directed at ‘mainstream’ education and so on. (Anteliz et al. 2006b, p. 754)

The journal’s special theme issue investigated this proposition of ‘marginalised pedagogues’ in relation to seven groups of students and their respective teachers: non-traditional pre-undergraduate university students in Australia (Coombes & Danaher, 2006), low income and immigrant families in Japan (Gordon, 2006), the children of nomadic pastoralists in Nigeria (Umar, 2006), travelling fairground families in Italy (Gobbo, 2006), cultural minorities in the US (Rodriguez, 2006), inner city youth in the US (Brunetti, 2006) and sexual minority university students and teachers in Canada (Grace, 2006). Responding to these articles, Currie (2006) helpfully encapsulated their broader significance for understanding the intentions and the effects of empowering educators and for promoting enabling teaching and learning in research and practice:

This special theme issue is a jigsaw of issues, but with common elements. All the articles are eloquent in their descriptions of marginalisation, and the subtle and not-so-subtle ways that educators are kept to the margins because of their ‘otherness’ or the ‘otherness’ of those whom they teach . . . While educators are replicating their lives in the school system, we need to ensure that the pool of educators gives the widest possible expression of experience and identity to those who come to learn. Learning is our core purpose and that is what makes us human – the promise of education must include every learner and every educator, and we must continue to find ways to position them at the centre of the learning agenda, the curriculum, the life and soul of our school[s], colleges and universities. (p. 837)

One theoretical and methodological benefit of exploring this emphasis on the dis/connections between teachers’ identities and their work in teaching variously marginalised students is that doing so helps to explicate what is otherwise likely to remain implicit and invisible; thus the political dimension...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title Page
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of Figures
• List of Tables
• Foreword by Marc Clarà
• Acknowledgements
• Notes on Contributors
• List of Abbreviations
• 1 Empowering Educators: Promoting Enabling Teaching and Learning in Research and Practice
• 2 Investigating Inquiry Pedagogy: Cracking The Code of Learning
• 3 Transformative Pedagogy in Preparing Teachers through the Study of Immigrant Experiences
• 4 Neuroscientific Possibilities for Mainstream Educators
• 5 The Homogenising Effect of Standardised Curriculum on Pedagogy
• 6 Teachers’ and Counsellors’ Transformative Practices in an Age of Standardisation
• 7 Empowering Educators through Professional Learning
• 8 Self-Identified Teaching Styles of Junior Development and Club Professional Tennis Coaches in Australia
• 9 Voices from Sudan: The Use of Electronic Puzzles in an Adult Refugee Community Learning
• Index