Abstract:

In the article the authors analyse future teachers’ professional visions, identifying what relationships with students in the educational process they expect to create. A clear personal vision is important at the beginning of every activity because it gives sense to the work and can become a powerful stimulus in the improvement of the current situation. The United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) believes that the teacher-student relationship is the core of the education process (Donghui, 2019). It has been noticed that the teacher-student relationship is one of the most problematic fields as far as the pedagogical activity and education-friendly environment are concerned (Barkauskaitė et al., 2015).

The traditional concept of education justifies the hierarchical model of the teacher-student power relationship. In the modern educational process a democratic relationship becomes an aspiration. Its importance arises not only on ontological level but also on epistemological level. The democratic teacher-student relationship foresees their equal participation in cognitive processes, the aspiration to empower the experiences of the marginalized subjects in the construction of new knowledge based on epistemic diversity.

Quite often the previous learning process of future teachers has quite many elements of traditional education. It impacts the professional visions created by them. This impact in the research has a twofold manifestation. One of the variants to create the relationship with students is to maintain the model of traditional power relationships demonstrating one’s epistemic authority as a pedagogue, maintaining the control centred in the hands of the teacher. Another variant is to critically reflect on and evaluate the known models of power relationship in the educational process and foresee the opportunities of transformation responding to the newly constructed expectations of the new participants of the educational process. Future teachers in the creation of their professional vision have to reflect on contradictory experiences, therefore, the expectations of the teacher-student relationship substantiate the coexistence of different discourses. In order to reveal the tendencies of the change of power relationships in the educational process in the article the problem question is analysed – what expectations of the transformation of power relationships do future pedagogues reflect on in their professional visions?

The analysis of future teachers’ professional visions is performed by means of interpretative phenomenology (Smith, Flowers, Larkin, 2009) when both the importance of the meanings constructed by future teachers and the researchers’ interpretations based on their experience and knowledge are emphasized. The authors of the article justify the analysis of the research results with the perspective of critical theory. It not only indicates the importance of future teachers’ reflectivity analysing the models of the teacher-student relationship but also gives preconditions for the change in the social order, in this case, for the transformation of the educational process.

Keywords:

Power relationship, future teachers, expectations of transformation, professional vision.