Teachers’ beliefs, which are believed as the most valuable psychological constructs, have been experiencing an embarrassing situation that there are no shared or agreed understandings on the term of teachers’ beliefs, and beliefs have become one of the most difficult concepts to define and evaluate ever, since the beliefs do not involve themselves much into empirical investigations but tend to be personalized and culturally bound (Chen, 2006; Mansour, 2009). Pajares (1992) has mentioned that “the difficulty in studying teachers’ beliefs has been caused by definitional problems, poor conceptualization, and different understandings of belief structures” (cited in Mansour, 2009). But there’re still many researchers trying to reach some definitions on teachers’
beliefs.
As early as 1933, Dewey had described belief as an assertion about the fact or principle, and the third meaning of the thought, whose value is tested by itself, and he believed in the crucial importance of belief, for belief “covers all the matters of which we have no sure knowledge and yet which we are sufficiently confident of to act upon, …also the matters that we now accept as certainly true, as knowledge, but which nevertheless may be questioned in the future” (cited in Pajares, 1992).
Later in 1968, Rokeach stated that “all beliefs have a cognitive component representing knowledge, an affective component capable of arousing emotion, and a behavioral component activated when action is required” (Pajares, 1992), and further he claimed that “belief is any simple proposition, conscious or unconscious, inferred from what a person says or does, capable of being preceded by the phrase ‘I believe that. . .’” (cited in Kleine & Smith, 1989). Nisbett and Ross (1980) have defined beliefs as “reasonably explicit propositions about the characteristics of objects and object classes” (cited in Pajares, 1992).
Sigel (1985) tries to explain that beliefs are “‘mental constructions of experience — often condensed and integrated into schemata or concepts’ that are held to be true and that guide behavior” (cited in Pajares, 1992). By developing the objective credibility of beliefs, Harvey (1986) describes belief as “an individual’s representation of reality that has enough validity, truth, or credibility to guide thought and behavior” (Pajares, 1992).
Similar to Sigel, Eisenhart et al. (1988) highlight the subjective characteristic of beliefs, and state that belief is an attitude which affects “the way in which we perceive the reality, guide both our thoughts and our behaviors” (Farrell & Lim, 2005).
It seems that Kagan and Pajares put a lot of interest and efforts on the understanding about teachers’ beliefs, whose articles have become the most-cited and the most popular till now. Kagan (1992) refers to belief as “a particularly provocative form of personal knowledge” (cited in Mansour, 2009), and it is “tacit, often unconsciously held assumptions about students, classrooms, and the academic material” (Kleine & Smith, 1989), and Kagan also believes that “most of a teacher’s professional knowledge can be regarded more accurately as belief” (Mansour, 2009).
Pajares’ discussion on teachers’ beliefs might be the most comprehensive and detailed ever, who puts beliefs “within a constellation of related constructs that includes attitudes, expectations, values, opinions, perceptions, conceptions, and dispositions, among others, all of which exert powerful influences on behavior” (Prime & Miranda, 2006). Furthermore, Pajares (1992) has explained that teachers’ beliefs “are the main component of formulating theories, since they are static and can exist beyond individual control or knowledge” (Mansour, 2009), and they “represent eternal truths that remain unchanged in a teacher’s mind regardless of the situation” (Pajares, 1992).
Based on the former research, many scholars more recently have also tried to develop their own understandings on teachers’ beliefs, for example, Richardson (1996) looks at beliefs “as part of a group of constructs that define and describe the structure and content of mental states believed to drive one’s action” (Chen, 2006); Fang (1996) defines teachers’ beliefs “as a repertoire of general knowledge of objects, people, events, and their characteristic relationships”; Loucks-Horsley et al. (1998) argue that “beliefs are more than opinions: they may be less than ideal truth, but we are committed to them”
(cited in Mansour, 2009); Sahin et al. (2002) refer to teachers’ beliefs as “teachers’
thinking and interpretations of their work involving their feelings, attitudes, experiences and decisions” (cited in Chen, 2006); Cunningham et al. (2005) stress that “belief is a calm, pleasant state, a habit of mind, available to draw upon whenever we are active in the world”.
There are dozens of people who agree that beliefs are the permeable and dynamic structures, whose potent affective, evaluative, and episodic nature makes them act as a kind of filter through which new phenomena are interpreted, new knowledge and experiences are screened for meanings (Pajares, 1992; Thomas et al, 2001; etc.). In
common, those who have studied on beliefs agree on the “unique composition and cognitive affiliation” of teachers’ beliefs (Luft & Roehrig, 2007).
As the broad cognitive psychological construct, usually beliefs mix themselves with emotions and volition, and play the role as the intrinsic certitude on the truth of theory and the correctness of behavior, so they show themselves as a kind of trust, dependence or assurance to people and things, and can be interpreted as individual’s adamantine attitude to some thoughts or opinions about the nature and society, and later “these beliefs become their ‘self’ so that individuals come to be identified and understood by the very nature of the beliefs and habits they own” (Mansour, 2009). That’s why beliefs can be far more influential in “determining how individuals organize and define tasks and problems”, and are believed as the best predictors of how teachers might behave in their classrooms (Pajares, 1992).
Besides the signature as easily recognizable or unconsciously held conviction, beliefs are also seen as philosophical principles and assumptions, which can be traced to individuals’ earliest philosophical contemplations (Pajares, 1992). From the philosophical perspective, belief means faith, which people are sufficiently confident of and accept as something certainly true, which belong to some kind of principles and ideals that people believe they should follow in their life, and which are also the core of consciousness and some assertions about the facts, including basically the outlooks about the world, history, life, morality and more (Pajares, 1992).
Because of the beliefs’ complexity, some researchers think that all kinds of beliefs construct a belief system with different intensities and complex connections with one another, and in the center of the belief network there are beliefs which touch on an individual’s identity or self, are more connected to other beliefs in the peripheral strands of the web, are more important for the person and are also more difficult to be changed, besides, it’s also believed that the earlier the beliefs formed as the basic concepts, the more strongly they can resist change, on the contrary, the newly acquired beliefs are the most vulnerable to change (Pajares, 1992; Raths, 2000).
About the belief system, Hermans et al. (2008) conclude, based on the theories of Harvey (1986) and Pajares (1992), that “belief system is a set of conceptual representations which signify to its holder a reality or given state of affairs of sufficient
validity, truth and/or trustworthiness to warrant reliance upon it as a guide to personal thought and action”, and the belief system serves “as a personal guide by helping individuals define and understand the world and themselves”. Since teachers’ beliefs shape the ways that teachers perceive and interpret the interactions happened in the classrooms, and also influence their construction of intentions in response to those interactions, Artzt & Armour-Thomas (1998) suggest that teachers’ beliefs work “as an integrated system of personalized assumptions about the nature of a subject, its teaching and learning” (cited in Thomas et al., 2001).
However, teachers’ beliefs are not genetic or inherent with birth, but are “attitudes, values, expectations, theories, and assumptions about teaching and learning that teachers accumulate over the time” (Chen, 2006). As far as many researchers are concerned, “beliefs are clearly personal constructions, entities that belong to an individual”, and like Nespor (1987) has also described, beliefs are “episodic, highly personalized, and containing affective and evaluative components” (Luft & Roehrig, 2007). So in the fundamental sense, teachers’ beliefs, more generically regarding their views of the world, “appear to be less reducible to behavioral and biological terms”, but tell more about the social cultural contexts, in which teachers have grown up and continue to act (Kleine & Smith, 1989).
From this research based on the teachers’ interviews, it’s proved that teachers’ beliefs at least include the following characteristics:
1) Beliefs can be conscious and also unconscious to teachers: e.g. most of the teachers in the interview could clearly speak out their beliefs, but several teachers like GRD21F said she was not aware of it all the time but she thought her belief is there in the background somehow, and CCD19F said that she didn’t think she had some educational belief, for she was not an educational researcher or expert who might have beliefs on education, so she just tried to do a good job every day without thinking of too much.
2) Beliefs are the assertions that teachers believe are true, right, and good, which teachers try to hold on and want to realize in their teaching practices: e.g. GGB5F believes that the independent study is the best way for students to learn, that’s why she always tries to give students some support or tips but let them study
independently even though she cannot do it all the time; CRB6M believes in the individual development of students, which, however, doesn’t fit the reality of knowledge-centered education, he still tries his best to do the personal communication and individual tutoring after class.
3) Ideals and assumptions constitute a large part of beliefs that teachers describe and explain the reality in an ideal way: e.g. GHH38M believes successful education is to do things in a new form every day and find the right topic for each child, because children are different, but in the reality he realizes it doesn’t work in that way and no one can do everything new; CHH10M believes that successful education should have no single mode, for education is not a factory and children cannot be the product coming out of the same mode, but actually the education system always tries to pursue one mode and one goal.
4) Beliefs are the values, theories and philosophy that teachers form and accumulate year after year: e.g. GGH7M used to focus on the subjects and topics, not to be so occupied in teaching social interaction like now, but later due to the world globalization and European immigration, he learned that different social values became more important in achieving the success of a profession than before; in the beginning years of CCD23F’s teaching, she didn’t have her own understanding on education but just followed blindly the teaching ways of other teachers, after 8 years, she became a mother and had the maternal love, then she started to realize that education is to love children and be responsible for them, for love is the source of the education, and without love there’s no education and no successful education.
5) Beliefs are very personalized and have the individual unique historical branding:
through reading the stories of teachers involved in the interviews, it is very easy to see that the teachers have different beliefs built on their very different life experiences from the school-days till now, each one is like a personal autobiography filled with historical, episodic, emotional, and specially significant slices of life, and also shows an individual learning and developing process with imitation, trial, reflection, summary, improvement, adaptation, change and struggle between holding on and giving in.
6) Beliefs are cultural, contextual, situational, and have connections with education system, school type/level, teaching subjects, student ages and so on: e.g. teachers like GGH7M, GGM10F in the Gymnasium believe successful education is to prepare students for the university, for Gymnasium is the only track leading directly to tertiary education; in Chinese culture, hardworking is a very good character, so the teachers like CHH6F, CHH18F don’t think the study in senior high school is too much for students, but believe students can train their hardworking character during the very hard study, for a hardworking student could be successful.
7) Beliefs do play an important role in influencing teachers’ reactions and decisions in class and guiding teachers’ teaching behaviors, even though teachers’ behaviors are not always consistent with their beliefs: e.g. CCD5F believes successful education is to make students interested and happy in study, so in her lessons she tries to show students some videos or cartoon fragments involved in some knowledge of physics to make them find funny and interesting, but still it’s hard to get their interest in studying physics and she doesn’t want her students to be happy but learn nothing, so most of the time she has to do the repeated knowledge exercises without touching their interest.