Changes in the Beliefs and Practices of School Teachers as the Basis for Independent Action of Adolescents. Institutional Approach

Abstract

Independence is one of the key results of modern school education, which is recorded in documents and reports at various levels. Research directly on independence is difficult, since there is no single approach to the operationalization of this phenomenon. The article attempts to fix the trend of destructuring and describe the features of its course in the beliefs and practices of school teachers of one general education school. As conceived by the author, this approach opens up prospects for theoretical and empirical understanding of the independent and initiative action of the student in the institute of school. For this, three elements of the institutional structure of the school were identified: rituals, disciplinary practices, the type of relationship between the teacher and the student, and the ways of destructuring in each element were described: refusal, mitigation, creation of new practices. The basis of the qualitative study was interviews with fifteen teachers from a primary and secondary school in a residential area of Moscow. The author comes to the conclusion that the process of destructuring is slower compared to other spheres of public life due to the limitations outlined in the article. The results of an empirical study can be useful for studying the independent and proactive behavior of an adolescent in the space of the school by teachers with varying degrees of rigidity in their practices, by teachers who use practices that are not typical for the institute of the school.