The present narrative study examined the purposes that language teachers pursue in their research studies. The study also explored the opportunities and challenges that teachers experience while doing action research. Data were collected through a survey of narrative frames among 68 teachers, reflective essays written by 9 teachers and individual…

This paper reports the findings of an evaluative study of an initiative, in its sixth year of implementation, enhancing the learning and teaching of mathematics in 20 disadvantaged secondary schools in KwaZulu-Natal (KZN), South Africa, twenty years after democracy. Findings highlight the importance of initial and ongoing professional development…

An exponential body of extant research illustrates the symbiotic dyad action research, andragogy, reflective praxis, and transformative learning share. This paper contains a narrative review of 83 action research papers submitted to the researcher as part of the fulfilment of the Bachelor of Education degree from April 2011 to May 2013.…

Sub-Saharan Africa has predominantly rural populations unable to offer children sustainable access to early literacy and childhood care and education. Children's literacy development starts very early in life through participation and experiences in the home and preschool. My research in rural Zimbabwe, Kenya, Uganda, and Tanzania shows that the…

This study used semi-structured in-depth interviews to explore empowerment patterns among teachers who hold leadership positions in school. Our qualitative analysis presents a hierarchical ladder with three types of empowerment amongst these teachers, ranging from limited empowerment through rewarding empowerment to change-enhancing empowerment.…

Purpose: The purpose of this paper is to examine relationship between teacher competences and organizational citizenship behavior (OCB) with empowerment as a mediating factor. Design/methodology/approach: The study took a cross-sectional descriptive and analytical design. Using cluster and random sampling procedures, data were obtained from 383…

The aim of this study was to examine teacher learning in terms of teachers' professional agency in the professional community of the school. Altogether 2310 Finnish comprehensive school teachers completed a survey. Results showed that teachers' active efforts to learn in the professional community and to promote school development cannot be…

Effective teachers have been described as possessing a vision for their teaching. However, the current high-stakes accountability climate has provided challenges for teachers attempting to align their instruction with their vision for teaching. The goal of this study was to explore 3 in-service teachers' visions and perceived obstacles they faced…

This paper sets out to advance the concept of an "epistemology of compassion" first proposed by Vandeyar (2013; 2016). Utilising a single embedded case study and the theoretical mooring of post-conflict pedagogy this paper attempts to find links between Jansen's perceptions of a post-conflict pedagogy and Freirean pedagogy and to argue a…

Purpose: The purpose of this paper is to explore the relationship between school leadership practices and teacher empowerment in the Finnish policy culture. Specifically, moral leadership and distributed leadership enacted by school principals are tested in a simultaneous design as predictor to two distinct yet related aspects of teachers' sense…

Although studies have examined numerous factors that predict junior faculty success, previous research has paid little attention to the role played by department chairs. Drawing on theory from person-environment fit theory and value congruence, we sought to examine the implication of a match versus mismatch between faculty members and their chairs…

Internationally teachers are called upon to act as agents of change. However, there is little clarity about the kind of change teachers are expected to contribute to and even less empirical evidence about the ways teacher agency operates in schools and beyond. Empirical analyses of teacher agency require a clear articulation of the purpose and…

This study investigated the relationships of teacher efficacy, perceived organizational control, and the teacher-student age gap with teachers' retirement attitudes. Stratified random sampling was adopted to collect survey responses. A total of 498 valid surveys from 33 elementary schools were collected. Correlational analyses revealed significant…

Research has accumulated important knowledge over recent decades on how licensed language teachers develop and learn from cognitive and socio-cultural stances. Yet, relatively little evidence exists on how non-licensed-in-English language teachers (NLELTs) grow professionally in their communities. Similarly, few studies have yet investigated the…

The present small-scale study aimed to investigate teacher agency from the perspective of in-service language teachers in relation to their perceived professional space. It specifically aimed to have an understanding of factors contributing to teacher agency positively and negatively. To this end, eight Turkish EFL teachers working at private and…