| dc.description.abstract | In school, administrators and teachers often have different points of view. About energy saving, we often concern about whether students do some actions as they have learned. In fact, in most schools, many students actually do many actions to save energy. On the other hand, we seldom concern about the resistance owing to different points of view between school administrators and teachers. Sometimes school administrators complain that teachers or students do not follow the school policies, but teachers or students think that school administrators do not understand the real condition in classroom. Teachers and school administrators usually have a gap between their standpoints; nevertheless they have few opportunities to communicate or negotiate with each other.
Owing to the circumstances above, we chose an energy saving electric meter curriculum at a junior high school as a research topic, and we need some theories as a lens for research analyses. The junior high school started an electric meter curriculum for one school energy saving plan two years ago, this curriculum has some special design, for example, the cooperation between teachers and school administrators. The participants of this curriculum are administrators, teachers of different subjects, tutors (homeroom teacher) and students. Students learn how to read electric meter numbers, record it, learn some knowledge about energy saving, and self-criticize the behavior which they do about energy saving. Teachers’ and administrators’ rules and working models are different. To understand and find inner contradictions between teacher system and administrator system, we use Engestrom’s Activity theory. We also observe how these people of two systems communicate and negotiate with each other by using Wenger’s theory, community of practice.
Our research method is qualitative research, and we conduct an Ethnography way by attending meetings in the junior high school. After meetings, our team administers in-depth surveys with interviews to teachers, administrators and students who participated in this curriculum to support the information we have got in several meetings.
The result of this study indicated four kinds of disturbances: disturbances about the overlap of areas which teachers and administrators control from contradictions of their division of labor and tools, disturbances about conduction sequence from contradictions of their division of labor and rules, disturbances about different goals from contradictions of their tools and subjects. In the negotiation process of teachers and administrators, many background structure factors influence both sides’ standpoints, but they seldom think about this when arguing. There is also a situation that we called “delayed negotiation”, for example, some tutors or young teachers believe that they do not have influence on school decision making, yet after meetings, they did not really follow the policies other people decided, and then they have to make more efforts to negotiate with each other.
Nowadays, energy saving is still an important concept all over the world. We hope our results can help some schools, which are introducing energy saving curriculum, find some obstructions of practice. Especially for the cooperation between teachers and administrators, we found some contradictions of practices that can aid schools in developing curriculum, and lead to a more problem-solving issue.
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