General beliefs of teachers and students about working and living environment: Implications for mutual cooperation

The paper empirically tests the assumption that parents' perspective and teachers' perspective in the situation of cooperation are generated from the guiding action of general beliefs of both about their role and the conditions of its fulfillment in the existing everyday working and living conditions. The research sample consists of 270 respondents who were divided into three subsamples (170 teachers, 60 parents/teachers, 40 parents) by the research draft. For the purposes of the research, three varieties (with respect to the three aspects of respondent's role) of the same questionnaire (isomorphic open-ended questions, narrative answers) were created. The questions were thematised around the way teachers and parents observe difficulties in functioning, each from their own role, the way they determine their causes and consequences, and the kinds of support resources they use in the endeavors to cope with difficulties. The results indicate that the difficulty reported by parents to be conditioned by systemic factors (the lack of time for children due to providing work and money) gains the status of external/systemic causes of degradation of educational values in teachers' beliefs (delegating responsibility to parents for systemic difficulties), which can pose a significant obstacle to relational understanding. The finding points out to the importance of developing the skill of change of perspective in teachers in order to achieve coordination of differences in beliefs and develop an internal framework of mutual understanding