Power Relations in Classes Taught by Student Teachers

One of the greatest challenges for student teachers and then for novice teachers is the classroom management. The teacher’s ability to perceive the current state of the class climate and the specific setting of individual students is an essential requirement to complete didactic aims in order to be able to teach in the class. Our research was focused on student teachers from Faculty of Education, who have gained one of their first school reality experience in their teaching practice. At the same time, this experience was thematised by the concept of power in a school class. Power can be defined as a potential to affect attitudes and acts of others (McCroskey, 2006) and as such it presents a core area of the teaching process to a considerable extent. To deal with this complex phenomenon, a design of mixed methods research was applied. The main research question was: How does a process of power negotiation take place between student teachers and their students in classes in Czech lower secondary schools during their longterm teaching practice? The qualitative part was based on videostudies of eight student teachers’ teaching in the course of one semester (48 lessons were videotaped), on semistructured interviews with these student teachers, and on reflective diaries that were written by these student teachers during their teaching practice. Quantitative data bring results of the Power Bases: Version for Student Teachers (Vlčková, Mareš, & Ježek, 2015) questionnaire into our study. The questionnaire is an adaptation of one of the latest and most used instruments measuring perceived power of university teacher – Teacher Power Use Scale (Schrodt, Witt, & Turman, 2007) which is based on the most influential typology of power as a relational phenomenon by French and Raven (1959). This typology distinguishes teacher‘s power in relation to a (by students perceived) principle on which it is based on, i.e. coercive, reward, legitimate, referent, and expert power.Příspěvek prezentuje výsledky smíšeného výzkumu moci studentů učitelství PdF MU na praxích