PEDAGOGICAL LEGITIMACY OF TEACHER SOCIAL INFLUENCE IN THE CLASSROOM

Abstrakt

The study aims to develop a conceptual framework for assessing the pedagogical legitimacy of teacher social influence in classroom settings. Although teacher social influence constitutes an inherent component of educational practice, current educational and psychological scholarship lacks a coherent framework for distinguishing pedagogically legitimate influence from manipulation, psychological control, and coercion. The article is designed as a theoretical analytical study based on a critical synthesis of contemporary research in education, psychology, philosophy of education, and educational ethics. Relevant theoretical approaches were integrated through conceptual analysis to construct a normative analytical framework for evaluating the pedagogical legitimacy of teacher social influence. The study proposes an original conceptual model consisting of three pathways of teacher social influence, two threshold conditions, and four evaluative criteria of pedagogical legitimacy. The model demonstrates that pedagogical legitimacy depends not on the effectiveness or intensity of teacher influence itself but on the professional justification of a specific educational intervention with regard to its purpose, proportionality, epistemic responsibility, and respect for student dignity, reviewability, and distributive responsibility. The proposed framework contributes to contemporary educational theory by integrating empirical knowledge about teacher social influence with normative principles of pedagogical evaluation. It provides a systematic analytical basis for examining the pedagogical legitimacy of teacher decision making and offers a theoretical foundation for future empirical validation, professional reflection, and teacher education