Abstract
Through an in-depth study of forty-seven teachers, I examine how teacher commitment to students plays out under conditions of socioeconomic adversity. I theorized that commitment is the degree of educators’ determination to respond to student needs. Empirically, I distinguished how individual teachers perceive and respond to student needs in a context where students bring more needs than educators can handle. I analyzed whether conventional factors drawn from the literature are associated with teachers’ responses to student needs. The findings show that teachers express their commitment as a trade-off between responsiveness and boundary-setting in the face of student needs. Amid this struggle, teachers are forced to draw a line between the needs that they are able to handle and the ones that they are not. Following this rationale, four types of commitment were identified: alienated, restricted, conditional, and boundless. These four types of commitment describe a spectrum of determination to respond to student needs from the lowest (alienated) to the highest (boundless). Findings also show that none of the factors theorized – expectations, self-efficacy, ethic of service, deservingness, and self-interest –distinguish teachers with stronger commitment from those with lower commitment in a straightforward manner. Rather, a set of more subtle factors differentiates more committed teachers from less committed teachers: hope, internal locus of control, a sense of meaning from transforming social disparities, valuing students as morally deserving, and meaningful integration of organizational demands with student needs.
Details
Presentation Type
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session
Theme
Learner Diversity and Identities
KEYWORDS
Teacher commitment, Adversity, Student needs
