期刊名称：International Journal of Environmental and Science Education
电子版ISSN：1306-3065
出版年度：2006
卷号：1
期号：2
页码：120-136
出版社：IJESE
摘要：Teachers are concerned with effective teaching in their classrooms, and there are times they employ some techniques to this end. One influential factor promoting the quality of teaching, for classroom practitioners, is to shape their use of authority and act of teaching around robust theories. However, it is not always an easy task for them to regulate their teaching according to the current theoretical frames in the ever-changing atmosphere of a classroom. Technique oriented approaches focusing the attention more on techniques than understanding lead practitioners to adhere to top-down approaches. Normalized antidemocratic values infiltrating into the school culture further reshape teachers’ use of authority. Therefore, there are times teachers find themselves demonstrating teaching acts inclined towards obsolete theories, justified beliefs, or cultural myths. There are three inherent factors misleading classroom practitioners’ authority. Those include theoretical vulnerability of their teaching acts, infiltration of behaviorist discourses into their practices, as well as the force of crystallized myths upon their act of teaching. Such contaminating factors, in particular, lure practitioners into the pitfalls of authoritarianism that, in the long run, silences students or of laissez-faire and indifferent approaches that eventually undermine the process of democratization by inviting teacher authoritarianism to the forefront. This study aims to clarify what are meant by four different authority (authoritarian, authoritative, laissez-faire, and indifferent) and to analyze the way novice teachers fall into the alluring pitfalls of authoritarian, laissez-faire, and indifferent approaches.
