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Collegiality and women teachers in elementary and middle school settings: The caring relationship and nurturing interdependence
Abstract
Understanding the ways of working and interacting among teachers within the culture of the school continues to be incomplete. Women comprise over 80% of elementary teachers yet there has been scant acknowledgement that gender may be a contributing factor to our knowledge of this aspect of school culture. This study, in two parts, employed ethnographic research methodology that values the emic (insiders) perspective to examine the form and content of teacher collegiality in elementary and middle school settings in an urban area of a north eastern state. It involved an exploration and application of the insights and theoretical assumptions from the scholarship on women to examine the ways gender influences teachers' construction, maintainence and utilization of collegial relationships. This study found women teachers involved in an interpersonal social and cultural setting. Their relationships were based upon the expression of the caring relationship which offered informally constructed professional and personal support systems in the face of the contradictions, constraints, dilemmas and frustrations of practice. The study presents a theoretical model that posits a definition of collegiality among teachers as a process which moves teachers from a naive orientation towards interdependence to a more fully conscious interdependence. At the highest phase more fully conscious interdependence involves self-directed participation in joint enterprise around the tasks of teaching and the work of the school and commitment to community building. It includes engagement in activities of interpersonal and connected knowing. Nurturance, as an expression of the caring relationship, is demonstrated through the willingness to engage in dialogue and narrative. It is identified as the dynamic that facilitates the process of collegiality from naive to conscious interdependence. The study suggests that culture of collegiality constructed by the social and psychological orientations of the women teachers is an important part of our knowledge school culture. It recommends that the issue of gender becomes a seriously considered explicit element in the structuring of schools and the reconceptualization of teacher development programs, placing greater value on the activities of the caring relationship as essential and necessary preconditions to the realization of interdependence and the engagement in joint enterprise.
Subject Area
Teacher education|Educational sociology
Recommended Citation
Taafaki, Irene Jane, "Collegiality and women teachers in elementary and middle school settings: The caring relationship and nurturing interdependence" (1992). Doctoral Dissertations Available from Proquest. AAI9233166.
https://scholarworks.umass.edu/dissertations/AAI9233166