Individual, School, and National Factors Impacting Teachers’ Workplace Learning: Discourses of Informal Learning in North America and Lithuania

ISBN-13: 9781032048321 / Angielski

Elena Jurasaite-O'Keefe

Opis

By drawing on observation and detailed discourse analysis from interviews with teachers in Lithuanian and North American schools, this text identifies individual, school-specific, and national factors which impact teachers’ informal professional learning.

Addressing multiple layers of teacher learning, this text illustrates how factors including socio-economic status, individual learning style, cultural attitudes to education, and political histories support or impede workplace learning. Drawing on three fields of research—teacher education, cultural anthropology, and comparative international—the book posits teacher learning as a multidimensional socio-cultural process. Finally combining a typology of informal learners with other policy-driven factors, the text indicates how practices at school, district, and national levels might stimulate workplace learning.

Offering methodological innovations including unique research design and creative ways of using discourse analysis, this book will be of particular use to researchers and doctoral students in education, organizational and educational psychology, cultural anthropology, management, and beyond.

Spis treści

Part I: Multiple Layers of Workplace Learning  1. The Complexity of Teacher Learning  2. Researching Informal Teacher Learning  3. Portraits of Teachers  Part II: Teachers as Learners  4. Dispositions: Opportunistic—Proactive Learners’ Continuum  5. Sources of Learning: Individual—Social Leaners’ Continuum  6. Reactions to Dilemmas: Emotional—Cognitive Learners’ Continuum  7. Orientation to Problems for Learning: Self—Teaching-Oriented Problems  8. Engagement in Learning Process: Spontaneous—Deliberate  Part III: School Cultures as Contexts for Informal Workplace Learning  9. A Midwestern Elementary School in the USA  10. A Lithuanian School with Instruction in Russian Language  11. A Lithuanian School with Instruction in Lithuanian Language  Part IV: National Educational Cultures and Teacher Informal Workplace Learning  12. Centralization versus decentralization in educational systems  13. Teaching children versus teaching curriculum  14. Market-driven structure of professional development and evaluation versus structures motivating teachers’ professional growth  15. Teacher identities in a culture that is relatively stable versus a culture that has undergone a radical change  16. Final Thoughts

O autorze

Elena Jurasaite-O’Keefe is Associate Professor of Curriculum and Instruction at St John’s University, New York, USA.