Teacher
Roles
“Hoca
Camide!” is phrase which we all have welcomed in our lives for the sake of our
beloved Afet Hoca. However, what kind of a teacher was she that we all loved
her so much? What made her so special for the Turkish audience? What type of a
teacher role had she? This week, Kumaravadivelu and Yıldız seem to have some
possible answers to these questions as this week’s topic is “teacher roles”. Starting
with the article called “The Transformation of the Teaching Profession” by
Yıldız, I guess it wouldn’t be wrong to conclude that the teacher roles
overserved in Turkey seem to change together with the society itself. First of
all, the teacher as the religious official called “hoca” or “imam” transformed
into a government official “muallim”. Later on, this concept turned into a “modernizing
teacher”, “revolutionary teacher” during the 1960s to 1980s, and finally into
today’s “exam predatory technician teacher”. In addition to these theories,
Kumaravadivelu defines three kinds of teacher roles under his chapter
“Conceptualizing Teaching Acts”. These three classifications are as follows: a)
teachers as passive technicians, b) teachers as reflective practitioners, and
c) teachers as transformative intellectuals. Teachers of the first category
are, as the title also suggests, passive technicians. Their primary goal is to
promote student comprehension on the content. Their way of teaching is
mechanic, passive and boring. I guess the traditional teaching style in Turkey
can be a part of this category. Reflective practitioners, on the other hand,
are those teachers who pay importance to the context in which they will carry
out the theories. In this sense, passive technicians and reflective
practitioners seem to resemble one another; however, there is still a point
where these two types of teachers differ. While passive technicians just adopt
the theories put forward by the theorists without modifying them, reflective
practitioners re-formulate the theories so that they can fit better to the
context and environment of the classroom. The final classification is teachers
as transformative intellectuals. As the school environment possesses
heterogeneousness in terms of culture, learner profile, social norms etc.,
teachers as transformative intellectuals feel the need of inquiring about the
problems themselves and promote their own theories suitable for each and every
learner in class. These teachers put learners in the center of the teaching –
learning process, and promote constant self-reflection. Now that we know what
the teacher roles are, I guess we can tell which category Afet Hoca falls into.
If I am not mistaken, I regard herself as a transformative intellectual, as she
did formulate her lessons with her learners in her mind. As we are accustomed
to see so many passive technicians around us, maybe it was our wish to have
more dedicated teachers like Afet Hoca which made her so beloved. When I think
about my own mentor teacher at Atatürk Anatolian High School, I can say that
she fits into the category of teachers as reflective practitioners as she
mainly made use of a course book, but tried to adapt it to the class
environment with little but meaningful changes. When it comes to my own
category as a prospective teacher, I would like to say that I will do my best
to be a transformative intellectual. However, I still fear to be forced to
transform into a reflective practitioner as most probably the system will want
me to change accordingly. We will see together what the future holds J
Thank You!
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