Michalinos Zembylas

Job satisfaction among school teachers in Cyprus

Recent national and international studies carried out in a number of countries have drawn attention to the degree of job satisfaction among teachers. In general, it has been found that context seems to be the most powerful predictor of overall satisfaction. However, given that most of the international studies on teacher satisfaction have been conducted in developed countries, one realizes the need in the available literature for similar research in developing countries as well. This paper examines job satisfaction and motivation among teachers in Cyprus – a small developing country in the Eastern Mediterranean. An adapted version of the questionnaire developed by the “Teacher 2000 Project” was translated into Greek and used for the purposes of this study that had a sample of 461 K‐12 teachers and administrators. The findings showed that, unlike other countries in which this questionnaire was used, Cypriot teachers chose this career because of the salary, the hours, and the holidays associated with this profession. The study analyzes how these motives influence the level of satisfaction held by the Cypriot teachers.

Beyond teacher cognition and teacher beliefs: the value of the ethnography of emotions in teaching

This article is an attempt to show the value of the ethnography of emotions in teaching, and the importance of exploring teacher emotion in understanding teaching. A coherent account of teacher emotion must find a dynamic outside the cognitive, discursive or normative practices that have monopolized attention in research on teacher cognition and teacher belief. Thus it is argued that this dynamic can be found in the very character of emotional expression—what the anthropologist William Reddy (1997, 2001) calls emotives. This article makes the above case through the description of findings from a case study of an elementary school teacher (Catherine) who participated in a three‐year ethnographic project investigating the role of emotions in her teaching. Emotional suffering and emotional freedom are examined; such a theorization gives political meaning back to research on teacher emotions and allows us to discern the successes and failures of particular emotional regimes within a school culture.

Can Computer Use Hurt Science Achievement? The USA Results from PISA

A surprising result of the Third International Mathematics and Science Study (TIMSS) is that computer use was negatively associated with high student achievement in some countries. More specifically, the students from all three countries who indicated that they use computers in the classroom most frequently were those with the lowest achievement on the TIMSS in 1995. For the purpose of this study, a similar comparison was made for 15-year-old U.S.A. students, based on the data from the Program for International Student Assessment (PISA). The results of this study show that it is not computer use itself that has a positive or negative effect on the science achievement of students, but the way in which computers are used. For example, after controlling for the students socioeconomic status in the United States of America, the results indicated that the students who used computers frequently at home, including for the purpose of writing papers, tended to have higher science achievement. However, the results of this study also show that science achievement was negatively related to the use of certain types of educational software. This indicates a result similar to that found in the TIMSS data, which might reflect the fact that teachers assign the use of the computer and of educational software to the lower achieving students more frequently, so that these students can obtain more personal and direct feedback through educational software.

Differential effects of science attitudes and science achievement in Australia, Cyprus, and the USA

The purpose of this study was to investigate the ‘locality’ of the relationship between attitudes towards science, self‐beliefs and science achievement for senior high school students in Australia, Cyprus and the USA. These relationships were examined with the use of the structural equation modeling software, AMOS. The data for this study were obtained from the Third International Mathematics and Science Study database. The results of this study demonstrated the differential effects that science achievement and science attitudes can have on each other, depending on the characteristics of the educational systems within each of country. Furthermore, these findings provide a number of directions for further research.

Globalization, information and communication technologies, and the prospect of a ‘global village’: promises of inclusion or electronic colonization?

This paper discusses the reciprocal relationships among globalization, information and communication technologies (ICT), and the prospect of a ‘global village’. The current metaphor of a ‘global village’ (regardless of physical access to ICT) is problematic, and can be interpreted as a form of electronic colonization. However, through such concepts as blurred identity, nomadism, and hybridity, a distinctly (post‐modern) ICT landscape can be redrawn in a way that accepts the global identity of the ICT, but denies the colonial erasure associated with the global‐village narrative. ICT, in themselves, cannot serve as an end in education, but the demand for critical education involving ICT is pressing as the effects of globalization are experienced. Three methods of promoting decolonizing criticality are proposed: critical emotional literacy, collective witnessing, and collective intelligence.

Arts Integration in the Curriculum: A Review of Research and Implications for Teaching and Learning

Given a pile of jigsaw puzzle pieces and told to put them together, no doubt we would ask to see the picture they make. It is the picture, after all, that gives meaning to the puzzle and assures us that the pieces fit together, that none are missing and that there are no extras. Without the picture, we probably wouldn’t want to bother with the puzzle. … To students, the typical curriculum presents an endless array of facts and skills that are unconnected, fragmented, and disjointed. That they might be connected or lead to some whole picture is a matter that must be

The Global, the Local, and the Science Curriculum: A Struggle for Balance in Cyprus.

In documenting educational reforms in the science curriculum of developing countries, a number of tensions become apparent as a result of struggles to preserve local values while incorporating global trends. This article describes and analyses these tensions and paradoxes, and discusses the intersections of cultural, economic, administrative and educational history of elementary school science curriculum development in Cyprus since its independence from the British in 1960. Using a combination of methodological tools that range from document analysis, historical research and ethnographic methods of collecting data, it is argued that the global and the local can be viewed spatially in terms of linking people, spaces and diverse knowledges. In order to ensure that local values in science curriculum development can be sustained without being absorbed by globalization curriculum developers in developing countries need to create spaces in which the local can be performed together with the global.

Emotion, Reason, and Information and Communication Technologies in Education: some issues in a post-emotional society

In this article, the authors work across issues of information and communication technologies (ICT) in education to explore the meaning of emotional experience in the context of online learning. In light of Mestrovics (1997) notion of a ‘post-emotional’ society and the increasing role of ICT in education, it is argued that educators need to rethink, modify, or extend some of the assumptions made about the relationship between emotion and reason (e.g. as these assumptions are expressed in the traditional binaries between body and mind, and emotion and reason). The argument put forward is that opportunities and consequent decisions and actions about particular pedagogical practices and philosophies must engage with an analysis of the meaning and implications of these assumptions for learning and learners.

Michel Serres: a troubadour for science, philosophy and education

When all the people of the world finally speak the same language and commune in the same message or the same norm of reason, we will descend, idiot imbeciles, lower than rats, more stupidly than lizards. The same maniacal language and science, the same repetitions of the same in all latitudes–an earth covered with screeching parrots. (Serres, 1997, p. 124) The goal of instruction is the end of instruction, that is to say invention. Invention is the only true intellectual act, the only act of intelligence. The rest? Copying, cheating, reproduction, laziness, convention, battle, sleep. Only discovery awakens. Only invention proves that one truly thinks what one thinks, whatever that may be. (Serres, 1997, pp. 92–93)

Emotions and Science Teaching: Present Research and Future Agendas

Many educators and researchers point out that affective issues are important in teaching; however, little has been done to incorporate affective concerns in a systematic way in research on teaching. As Norman (1981) pointed out two decades ago, most cognitive theorists preferred to ignore the affective domain and concentrate instead on developing information-processing models of purely cognitive systems. Such an approach has been most obvious in the investigation of teacher cognition and teacher beliefs (e.g., Clark & Peterson, 1986; Kagan, 1992a, 1992b; Nespor, 1987; Richardson, 1996). The emphasis on teacher beliefs has been on teachers’ views and perspectives often without any discussion of the relevance of those beliefs to teacher emotions. For the most part, this area of research still avoids addressing how teacher beliefs interact with teacher emotions and attitudes or what the role of teacher emotions is in understanding teaching and learning. Yet, conducting research on emotions in education or on the emotions of teachers, more specifically, presents several challenges. First, emotions are very fluid and much more complex and difficult to describe than cognition (Boler, 1999; Janack, 2000; McLeod, 1989; Simon, 1982; Zembylas, 2002a, 2002b). Second, one of the reasons for the neglect of investigating emotion in teaching may be due in part to the domination of cognitive psychology over educational research, and the difficulty in capturing the emotional components of teaching for research purposes. Finally, there is the legacy of dualism, which has opposed reason to emotion, and accorded reason the high status inscribed in Western thinking. Embedded in Western thought is the assumption that emotions threaten the disembodied, detached, and neutral knower; consequently, as it is suggested, emotions do not offer any valid knowledge. This view has placed emotions in an inferior role and made much more difficult the legitimation of research on teacher emotion. This uneasy relation between emotion and reason provides the social and historical context from which many current views on emotions continue to emerge (Schutz & DeCuir, 2002). These issues assert that we are convinced about the importance of emotions in education only at a general abstract level (Beck & Kosnik, 1995). One can imagine, then, what happens in science education when educators in general have a hard time accepting emotions as a legitimate subject of research. After all, in schools, science is portrayed as rational and non-emotional (Alsop, 2001; Zembylas, 2002a). What is the place of emotion in teaching and learning science? Why should one pay attention to the way teachers feel about science and science teaching?