An Analysis of the Rural Area Elementary School Teachers’ Awareness of the Disadvantaged Social Environment and Their Responsive-Teaching of Schooling Author:Liang-Ping Juan
From September 2005 to June 2007, the researcher invited 43 teachers in rural areaelementary schools, north Taiwan by random-sample for interviews and instructionobservation. The data were analyzed from the concepts of the poverty theories, sociology ofeducation, and critical pedagogy for empowering the disadvantaged students. The findingof the research was that the teachers actually were aware of the problems that there weremany shortages of social capital and cultural capital in the poor communities andchildren’s families, but most of the teachers’ responsive-teaching and school curriculumpractice usually were conservative. The number of teachers who adopted knowledge-centercurriculum in their classrooms was larger than the number of teachers who adopted socialconstruction curriculum and learner-centered curriculum. The researcher tried to explorehow the assumptions that always existed in the school curriculum context strongly formedthe teachers’ curriculum consciousness and their curriculum practice. Finally, the researchsuggests that we can encourage teachers to reflect their views concerning education of thedisadvantaged students and deliberately decide their curriculum practice in order toelevate the quality of rural elementary schooling.
Keywords: the disadvantaged social environment, responsive teaching, teachers’ curriculum consciousness