Identifying the transversal competencies used by teachers in teaching-learning situations: double addressing as a resource for exercising pedagogical authority

Abstract

In teaching-learning situations, novice teachers are concerned with issues of classroom management and particularly face the challenge of authority or leadership, which requires transversal competencies. In our view, pedagogical authority relies on the agreement of the students and implies obedience while preserving their freedom. Teachers’ pedagogical authority is influenced by contextual factors among which the specific characteristics of the classroom group (Joinel Alvarez, 2023). In their literature review, Wenner & Campbell (2017) highlighted the need for new, high-quality empirical research on teacher leadership in order to gain a deeper understanding of the processes at work. To address this, we report here on our recent research aimed at understanding the extent to which novice teachers identify the challenges associated with group interactions and develop transversal competencies to cope with them (Joinel Alvarez & Lussi Borer, 2023). To this end, in 2018, we filmed ten novice teachers’ actual activity in their classrooms (24 class groups located in nine High Schools in the canton of Vaud, Switzerland) and confronted them with their activity while exercising pedagogical authority in teaching-learning situations. Activity analysis aims to transcend the issue of “good practice” which is replaced by a “professional issue” that teachers have to answer and in the course of which they will potentially face a dilemma. In order to act, the teachers will rely on a strategy based on intentions, expectations, emotions and concerns, to which research must be given access so as to understand the reasons why teachers act the way they do (Leblanc, 2018). By focusing on the activity and narrative of novice teachers, this research aims at producing scientific knowledge on their actual work by reflecting on their subjective experiences in understanding their activity. Based on think-aloud protocols (self-confrontation interviews sensu Poizat & San Martin, 2020) expressing teachers’ own professional experience (as internally perceived), we examine all the interactions within the classroom in which teachers make an authority-related request to one or more students. Within an overall complexity of interactions, we found that teachers use double addressing interactions in nearly one third (32.9%) of all interactions. These interactions involve two recipients whom the teacher addresses simultaneously. These may imply several students or subgroups of students, who are addressed by the teacher through two different communication channels (either verbally or nonverbally), in an imposed or in a chosen manner. By making them explicit, we contribute to the understanding of the double-adressing skills used by teachers to exert their pedagogical authority and open the way to further co-designed teacher education.