Abstract:

The paper summarizes the results of a longitudinal research focused on the issue of teacher authority as perceived by the primary school teacher trainees. The aim of the research was to find out what shift is there in the perception of authority in prospective primary school teachers over the past 10 years. Thus, the research responds to the allegations of an authority crisis, the difficulty of building informal authority towards today's pupils, the inability to find compromises between education actors (pupils, teachers, school, parents). The survey provides insight into the extent to which teachers are aware of the importance of authority, whether formal or informal, and whether they respond to changes in the importance of some factors influencing building and maintenance of teacher authority. The text also describes the research of the primary school teacher trainees’ opinions on the authority of the teacher. They were invited to express themselves on the subject of teacher authority in writing. The first part of the research was carried out ten years ago, the second this year with the aim of finding fundamental trends in the development of views on teacher authority within that period. Written statements of about one page were rewritten in electronic form and subjected to quantitative text analysis in the first phase of the analysis. Using descriptive statistical methods, the frequency of occurrence of terms related to teacher authority was evaluated. In the second phase of the procedure, statistical data were subjected to qualitative analysis using statistical data. The basic concepts were determined and codes were determined using open coding and unified structures were found in the form of grounded theories on the perception of the teacher's authority by the primary school teacher trainees.

Keywords:

Authority, teacher trainees, primary school, authority crisis.