Beliefs About Teachers’ Roles

The previous chapter suggests that the tensions between theoretical beliefs and action beliefs can be justified by context beliefs. However, participants’ negative evaluations created a sense of vulnerability, indicating that negative feelings mostly resulted from the inappropriate educational and administrative policies and practices in their institutions. The existence of such negative feelings may destroy their confidence in self, restrain their enthusiasm in teaching, and undermine their professional development by derailing them from their educational ideals. In this way, findings of the study refute the common idea that contextual factors play a key role in mediating the relationship between beliefs and practices, as context beliefs did not provide an internal tool to regulate the tension between theoretical beliefs and action beliefs.