A Case Study On Instructor-Student Conflict In Classroom In A Higher Technical College

In classroom, teaching becomes realities by the interactions between instructors and students. Harmonious and consistent interactions make the teaching efficient. However, in the classroom life, there inevitably exist some conflicts or contradictions between instructors and students. In the classroom of higher technical colleges, the conflicts instructors face do not decrease or disappear for students are adults. In contrary, the instructor-student conflicts have increased and interrupted the teaching, so as to influence the efficiency of the teaching.This study was a case one which chose a full time adult amateur junior class in a Shanghai technical college. The case included two liberal teachers, three major teachers and thirty-five students. The methodology of this study was qualitative one which collected data by classroom observation and interviews in three months. And basing on the data collected, this study described the instructors' and students' actions in conflicts and discussed factors resulting in instructor-student conflicts.This study showed that some instructors' or students' actions in classroom might cause instructor-student conflicts. The students' actions were some overt discipline actions including talking loudly, going out or in without permission of instructors and some covert discipline action changing into overt ones. The instructors' actions included that instructors made some regulations that students thought unreasonable and instructors expressed in discriminative or irrespective ways. And instructor-student conflicts caused by instructors often happened in the liberal classroom. Moreover, the study showed that the face regulation the instructors and students understood influenced the conflicts, to some extent.The study discussed the reasons resulting in these conflicts including that the difference in learning goal especially in credentials value and gaining ways between instructors and students, the gap between instructors' and students' expectation of opposite role and the reality, including lost of the students' expectation of instructors' role and the lost of the instructors' expectation of students' role, college institution such as class size, curriculum arrangement and credentials institution.