Teacher authority in the programme of the European school of Ljubljana

In the contemporary Slovenian society, which is characterized by multiculturalism and pluralism of values, there are many answers to important questions about which methods to use and which goals to pursue when it comes to bringing up our children, probably just as many as there are those who deal with these subjects on different professional levels. This question is not a big problem when it comes to upbringing children in the family context, since that answer still mainly depends on the choices and preferences of the parents or child’s legal guardians. The issue arises when we try to find an answer to what should be the manners and intentions of children upbringing in schools, especially primary schools, since primary education is mandatory. Considering the upbringing of children is one of our main tasks and with authority being one of its key factors, we have decided to explore the concept and the importance of authority in more detail. When it comes to children education and upbringing in schools, the teacher authority is especially important. It is therefore necessary that schools and their teachers design their upbringing strategies and become aware of different ways of establishing and maintaining authority, which would enable more successful and high-quality education and upbringing of pupils. European School Ljubljana is an international program which is very culturally diverse if we take into account different nationalities of students and their parents as well as the teachers. Given that the perception of authority is a result of many factors, including culturally determined characteristics and beliefs of a person, we wanted to examine how the teachers at that school perceive their authority and in what ways do they establish and maintain it with their students, which has also indicated the predominant type of establishing authority among them. We have compared the results of our research to a similar one conducted at another Slovenian school with a more representative sample of respondents. The results have shown that teachers of all groups evaluate the factors of teacher authority that they can influence more directly as the ones with higher importance and give the greatest significance to the ones regarding ethical criteria. Based upon their definition of teacher authority we have discovered that the predominant type of authority in the Slovene group would be authoritative type whereas the evaluations of the international group teachers were much more diverse. After comparing the answers of the Slovene group teachers to students’ answers obtained in the other research about kinds of teachers’ behaviour in the classroom, we have discovered important differences in the evaluation of different authority type indicators. The indicators of permissive – neglectful authority were amongst the lowest evaluated among teachers and the highest evaluated among the students. Those differences further prove the importance of consistent training and research about teacher authority which prevents us from causing different upbringing effects than the ones we would wish to attain