Teacher Competence

Paper Summary:

In this paper, the writer notes that as a profession that directly involves working with people, teaching is a very arbitrary profession. What constitutes "good" teaching is considered even more arbitrary, as the writer points out that definitions of good vary from person to person. Furthermore, the writer discusses that perceptions of teaching vary from student to student, each of whom has his or her own ideals and expectations regarding good teachers. A good teacher, in the writer's view, should connect with his or her students in a personal and targeted way. Most importantly, the teacher has a responsibility to make the teaching experience enjoyable for students. The writer concludes that students tend to be more responsive to a learning experience that is associated with enjoyment than one associated with pain or worse, boredom.

From the Paper:

"Aesthetic enjoyment can also be used to bring about the integrated sense of humanity that has become so important in the more tolerant 21st century. Multicultural classrooms can for example learn to appreciate the aesthetics of the art from a variety of cultures. In the scientific classroom, children can learn to appreciate the visual beauty created by combining certain formulae. Nature, as Haynes also states, can also be appreciated in an aesthetic sense for its beauty and uncorrupted wildness."
"While aesthetic appreciation is conventionally associated with the visual and the other physical sense perceptions, it can also relate to other forms of enjoyment, such as the imaginative appreciation of literature. Students can learn to expand their imagination via not only an appreciation of work written by others, but also by creating literature of their own. This can again be combined with pragmatism and functionalism in terms of learning language and grammatical structures and usage."

Sample of Sources Used:

• Haynes, Felicity. (1999). "Aesthetic Education". Encyclopedia of Philosophy of Education. http://www.ffst.hr/ENCYCLOPAEDIA/aesthetic.htm
• Kohli, Wendy. (2000). "Educational Theory in the Eighties: Diversity and Divergence". Educational Theory, Summer, Vol. 50, No. 3. http://www.ed.uiuc.edu/EPS/Educational-Theory/5%20Kohli.pdf

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