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Full-Text Articles in Education
School Cultures As Contexts For Informal Teacher Learning, Elena Jurasaite-O'Keefe, Lesley A. Rex
School Cultures As Contexts For Informal Teacher Learning, Elena Jurasaite-O'Keefe, Lesley A. Rex
Curriculum & Instruction Faculty Publications
This study descriptively compares international social contexts for teacher workplace informal professional learning from the teachers’ perspectives. Set in elementary schools in the U.S. and Lithuania, the study illustrates how teachers make sense of and engage in learning within the historical, political and administrative contexts within which they work. A sociocultural framework brings into view different opportunities for teacher informal learning. These appear in teachers’ discourse about their schools’ missions, building structures, classroom environments, organizational arrangements, traditions, and professional relationships as referenced in teachers’ discourse. The study argues for the importance of acknowledging teacher informal learning as a method of …
Teachers’ Workplace Learning Within School Cultures Community In The United States And Lithuania, Elena Jurasaite-O'Keefe
Teachers’ Workplace Learning Within School Cultures Community In The United States And Lithuania, Elena Jurasaite-O'Keefe
Curriculum & Instruction Faculty Publications
The purpose of this study is to explore teachers’ workplace informal professional learning and inform educational researchers, teacher educators, administrators and teachers about ways teachers learn to improve their practice. By questioning how teachers learn on-the-job to be better teachers and how school cultures position them as learners, this work generates hypotheses about relationships between the nature of workplace informal professional learning and its content and contexts. An ethnographic design based upon a grounded theory generates analytic categories from interviews and field notes through comparison of learning environments in three contrasting schools in two countries—Lithuania and the United States. Discourse …