- Title
- Teacher perceptions of changes in school infrastructure and how these impact on their teaching practice
- Creator
- Zivave, Takavada
- Date
- 2021
- Type
- Text; Thesis; PhD
- Identifier
- http://researchonline.federation.edu.au/vital/access/HandleResolver/1959.17/182582
- Identifier
- vital:16149
- Abstract
- The impetus of this study comes from the 2009 Commonwealth Government of Australia’s $16.2 billion investment in school infrastructure under the Building the Education Revolution (BER) program. The BER program was supposed to stimulate the economy through creating construction jobs by building schools and ensuring that workers had jobs during the global financial crisis. Provision of learning spaces and learning space design was secondary to this need to create construction jobs. This thesis aimed to explore the teaching activity using an activity system based on Cultural-Historical Activity Theory (CHAT) (Engestrom, 1987) with the intent of bringing out or exposing the contribution made by the BER school infrastructure program on teaching especially around issues of pedagogy, teamwork, wellbeing, collaboration and interactions with students. Using a mixed-methods approach, the study utilised three sources of data, document analysis, online survey responses and focus group interviews. In the first phase, data were collected using a document analysis, this information guided the design of the online survey instrument, which was used to collect data in the second phase. Data collected using both the document analysis and online survey responses were used in the third phase, which involved focus group interviews. The data analysis involved identifying, grouping together and labelling document analysis, data from the online survey and transcripts of focus group interviews. These were coded and organised into themes, or units of meaning. The quantitative data was presented in frequency tables and descriptive statistics. This quantitative data was corroborated with extracts from focus group interviews and document analysis data where possible. The study’s findings demonstrated that school infrastructure supports teacher collaboration by allowing for team planning and co-teaching. Furthermore, the study revealed a link between teacher collaboration and teacher wellbeing. The study findings indicate that when teachers plan together and co-teach, their workload is reduced contributing positively to teacher wellbeing. The study suggests that a relationship exists between school infrastructure and student-teacher interactions, which serves to reduce negative interactions when dealing with outside classroom behaviour. The present study seeks to generate insights that, while unique to participants and individuals, are anticipated to be of interest to teachers more broadly. Potentially, the findings from this study could inform other educational contexts, for example, school architectural designers. Significantly, this research seeks to contribute to literature on the importance of school infrastructure on teacher performance ultimately improving student-learning outcomes.; Doctor of Philosophy
- Publisher
- Federation University Australia
- Rights
- All metadata describing materials held in, or linked to, the repository is freely available under a CC0 licence
- Rights
- Copyright Takavada Zivave
- Rights
- Open Access
- Subject
- School infrastructure; School infrastructure development; Teacher practice; Pedagogy; Teacher collaboration; Teacher wellbeing
- Full Text
- Thesis Supervisor
- Fletcher, Anna
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| Thumbnail | File | Description | Size | Format | |||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| View Details Download | SOURCE2 | Australian Digital Thesis | 5 MB | Adobe Acrobat PDF | View Details Download |