Abstract:
Teachers pose different perspectives toward teaching. Some teachers share this attitude that teaching is just a job and a sole source of income, while others believe that teaching is a vocational and moralistic career associated with love, commitment, and devotion. This study, in the form of a qualitative grounded theory approach aimed to deeply investigate the interrelationship of data emerged from teachers' perspectives toward teaching as profession to develop a model in this regard. Therefore, twenty-six Iranian English teachers, teaching at schools and Farhang language institute, were requested to share their ideas as to how they view teaching as a profession. A semi-structured interview, in three sessions with 20 participants and focus-group interviews with 6 participants were conducted. Based on Corbin and Strauss (2014) systematic steps for grounded theory, the data then transcribed and codified. The findings ended with an eight-factor model containing 40 categories. The factors include: a) source of income, b) decreasing motivation, c) poverty and inclination to become a teacher, d) insufficient salary, e) deteriorated quality of teaching, f) experience, g) society negative attitude, h) dissatisfaction. The proposed model opens a new window for teachers, and reminds the government educational policy makers, training centers, ministry of education, and those who care about quality education and students' academic achievements to observe income inequality, and salary differentials, increase teachers' social status, and motivation, facilitate difficult working conditions, reduce resource wastage, support teachers appropriately ,decrease teachers' financial concerns, terminate the sense of socioeconomic inequality ,and speak out the voices of marginalized teachers.
Machine summary:
(2019) focusing on Iranian teachers’ perspectives on teaching as a vocation, developed an eight-factor model which included financial concerns and insufficient salary, love and passion for teaching, low social status, high demands for becoming a teacher, devotion and high sense of responsibility, limitations, and lack of freedom, setting a pattern and gaining experience, and equivocal images of teachers.
By face to face interviews and focus group discussions, the researcher attempted to explore the perspectives of Iranian English teachers as the participants of the study toward teaching as profession, and develop a model in this regard.
Through a qualitative grounded theory approach, the researcher aimed to investigate if Iranian English teachers view teaching as a mere job and a sole source of income like other professions.
3. Method Following a qualitative grounded theory approach, this study deeply investigated the inner link of data extracted from Iranian English language teachers’ perspectives toward teaching as profession to propose a model as a result.
The factors and the follow-up instances are presented in details as follows: A: Source of Income Data elicited from the participants’ viewpoints through face to face interview and focus group discussions directs attention to many important issues which range from materialistic view toward teaching, the main source to provide their families with necessary needs in life, financial self-efficiency and standing on their own feet to pure view towards becoming a teacher as a money-making job.