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Submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Education in the Department of Educational Psychology, University of Zululand, 1994. / The aims of this study were threefold : * Firstly, by means of a literature study, it examined the possible misconceptions that Indian teachers have of the black teachers' occupational world and the circumstances which have led to these misconceptions. * Secondly, an empirical survey consisting of structural questionnaires were constructed in order to ascertain the Indian teachers' perception of the black teachers' occupational world. * Thirdly, certain recommendations were made which could possibly eliminate the Indian teachers' misconceptions of the black teachers' occupational world. Education in South Africa is marked by severely discriminatory inequalities of provision. These inequalities coincide with ethnically fragmented structures of control centred on "own affairs" departments of education answerable to the white, Indian and coloured chambers of the tricameral parliament, while black education falls under the Department of Education and Training. The Department of National Education plays an overall co¬ordinating role. In all, the South African education system comprises eighteen separate departments of education, linked through weak co-operative arrangements and separated by marked resource imbalances. Indian teacher training in the RSA has reached such a significant stage in its administrative and curricular development that one is apt to overlook the vicissitudes through which it has passed. Inadequate communication, fostered by the policy of separate development (apartheid), has resulted in Indian teachers having little understanding of the black teachers' occupational world. In view of the limited and misleading information, perceptions of each other's professions are often misconstrued and consequently, a large degree of misunderstanding and mistrust exists between the two groups. Perception in this context is identified as the understanding or view that educators have of their occupational world as life-world. The education system that has evolved in South Africa this century is one of extraordinary complexity. The objectives of the National Party were segregated, differentiated, and unequal education for different racial groups, and political control over all education in the interests of whites. In short, its policy was to divide and control. Black education has always served the needs of those who provided it. Since its inception, black education has never addressed the needs and aspirations of the blacks in South Africa. Decades of apartheid education and rising pupil numbers have resulted in gross inequalities and huge backlogs in provision, especially in black education. The conditions under which black teachers work are poor and demoralising. Quality in education is in the first place dependent upon the quality of the teacher, his qualifications, experience, competence in the classroom, professional confidence and commitment. In all these areas the black teacher is under siege and fighting for survival. In order to establish the Indian teachers' perception of the black teachers' occupational world, teachers from Indian secondary schools were approached with the request to complete a questionnaire. Prior to the submission of the mailed questionnaire a simple random sample, within the target population, of teachers riving in and around Durban, were interviewed. On the basis of these informal unstructured interviews, the questionnaire was refined before submission to the effective population. Statistical analyses were conducted to fulfil the aims of the investigation and to test the research hypotheses stated. On the basis of the aims of this study certain recommendations were also formulated : * That the South African Teachers Council must be established. * That educational institutions be established and/or expanded where black teachers can improve their qualifications through attendance and/or distance education. That the training of adequately qualified teacher educators should become a top priority in black education systems. That the sensitivities of each community be respected. The present research is an exploratory study in determining the Indian teachers' perception of the black teachers' occupational world. It is the hope of the researcher that the present study will serve as a catalyst for further research.

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This thesis has explored the relationship between expressed teacher attitude and actual teacher behavior in the classroom. The Teacher Attitude Inventory was devised to measure teacher attitudes while the Teacher Behavior Inventory was constructed to indicate their behavior.Upon reviewing the data obtained from both inventories several reasons for the discrepancy between teacher attitudes and teacher behavior were formulated. They were: the statement of attitude was not reflected accurately by the statement of behavior on the Teacher Behavior Inventory, the marking system on the Teacher Attitude Inventory may not accurately help to reflect the exact opinions of teachers on particular statements; a misinterpretation of the attitude statements can lead to a discrepancy with the corresponding behavior statement; and the teachers actually believe what they said and yet they are unable to demonstrate such behavior in the class because of past experiences or because the school environment does not allow such behavior.

This study was designed to determine the effects of various teacher characteristics on their level of cultural competency as measured by the Cultural Competency Survey. Teacher characteristics of interest were sex, age, years of teaching, grade level currently teaching, and degree level earned.The sample consisted of 2800 teachers, teaching in 82 schools. They ranged in educational experience from student teachers to those with doctoral level degrees and in length of experience in urban schools from just a few months to over 29 years. Of the 2800 teachers requested to complete the survey, 594 were minority teachers. This makes up 20% of the teaching population.The Cultural Competency Survey was adapted with the help of the Indianapolis Public Schools from a paper-and-pencil survey to one that was administered to each and every IPS teacher through the IPS intranet survey capabilities delivered through the IPS Online portal.The data were analyzed using statistical programs from the Statistical Package for the Social Sciences (SPSS,13.0.1). Significant differences in the dependent variable on the Cultural Competency Survey were explored among the groups of teachers categorized by race/ethnicity, length of service, education, and grade level taught (the independent variable) with a standard split-plot factorial Analysis of Variance (ANOVA) design.Results showed main effects for sex and race with females generally scoring higher than males and African Americans scoring higher than Caucasians. Possible reasons for these findings were discussed and a call for future research was offered. / Department of Educational Leadership

This was an exploratory, descriptive study, focussed on the concepts used by certain teacher educators to describe their work. Open-ended interviews were conducted with 25 teacher educators who worked with undergraduate student teachers in one Canadian university. Their descriptions of the knowledge and the practice which they believed important to the successful completion of their work were classified. Themes were identified and compared to themes derived from a review of literature about teacher education. Three broad categories of belief about the nature of, and the relationship between, the theory and the practice of teacher education were identified. Sub-categories of two of the three broad categories were also identified. The categories which emphasized the primacy of theory were called naive deduction, classical rationalism and technical rationalism. The categories which emphasized the primacy of practice were naive induction, personal practical knowledge and inquiry. The third category emphasized the necessary interaction of theory and practice. Two other broad categories of belief were identified. They described teacher educators who believed student teachers acquire knowledge and skill best If teacher educators teach theory directly (reductionlsm) and those who believed student teachers learned best when helped to interpret experience (wholism). These beliefs were interpreted as being sustaining beliefs, that is, beliefs which serve as general guides to teacher educators' work. Some of these sustaining beliefs reflect the school context of teacher education, others the university context. As a result, teacher educators face dilemmas of choice. It was concluded that this research provided some avenues for further investigation which may help teacher educators to understand more clearly the difficulties experienced when programs are developed or changed. / Education, Faculty of / Curriculum and Pedagogy (EDCP), Department of / Graduate

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The purpose of this study was to determine the degree of sensitivity of preservice elementary teachers to the language differences of Mexican American children in an oral reading task. The review of related research dealing with language attitudes toward nonstandard speech revealed that te

This study examined implicit and explicit attitudes of teachers toward the Emotional Disturbance (ED) label, the strength of association between implicit and explicit ratings, and the variance in attitudes between different types of teachers or among teachers in different settings. Ninety-eight teachers (52 regular education and 46 special education teachers), from a mix of urban and rural school districts in central Indiana, completed three computer-based attitudinal measures: an implicit association test (IAT), a Social Distance Scale (SDS), and the Scale of Attitudes toward Disabled Persons (SADP). Results indicated that teachers possess a significant preference for the category of Learning Disability (LD) compared to ED, and the correspondence between implicit and explicit attitudes toward those two labels was strong. This data supports the notion that the ED label is perceived far too negatively by educators to serve as an effective category of services for children with serious mental health issues. / Department of Educational Psychology

Most school reforms require the implementation of policies and procedures; therefore, staff development has flourished as a means to introduce and reinforce required school, classroom, and teacher changes (Shroyer, 1990). The scant and inconclusive research regarding the impact of staff development on teacher change (Fullan, 1985; Griffin, 1983b; Guskey, 1986) has shifted from a focus on institutional factors impacting change to individual characteristics of the teachers involved in implementing change and the complex ecology in which these changes take place (McLaughlin, 1990). Recently, researchers have focused on the differences in teachers' beliefs and those implicit in the design of innovations to be implemented (Au, 1988; Johnston, 1988; Olson, 1980, 1981). Further, evidence exists that a teacher's beliefs can change throughout the staff development process (Richardson, Anders, Tidwell, and Lloyd, in press). These researchers, like Hollingsworth (1989), examined questions about the process of changing (Fullan, 1985); their research agendas focus on how new knowledge is used and how change occurs throughout the staff development process. Similarly, this case study was designed to identify changes in the subject's beliefs after she participated in a particular staff development project and to trace these changes throughout the process. The subject, Debbie, a veteran science teacher, enrolled in an inservice class to develop her questioning skills, to learn about thinking skills, and to implement the Taba Teaching Strategies in her classroom. In this case, changes in Debbie's beliefs were examined by comparing and analyzing the semantic maps of Debbie's responses in structured interviews (Spradley, 1970), including questions based on the Kelly Repertory Grid (Kelly, 1955) and the Heuristic Elicitation Method (Eisenhardt, Shrum, Harding, and Cuthbert, 1988). By reviewing and analyzing field notes, taped class sessions, and interviews with Debbie and other teachers at the site throughout the project, how this change in beliefs was exhibited throughout the process of changing was reconstructed in narrative form. Debbie described her beliefs privately and reconstructed them publically (Fenstermacher and Richardson, 1991) throughout the process of changing, struggling with her what beliefs about how students learn and her how beliefs as she practiced new teaching strategies (Sigel, 1985).