Classroom Power Relations

Understanding Student-teacher Interaction

Mary Manke

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 1997
• ISBN:
  9781135686994
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

This book is based on a careful theorizing of classroom power relations that sees them as constructed from the actions of all participants. Contrary to the common assumption that the teacher is the source of classroom power, it sees that power as arising from the interaction between students and teachers. If power is owned by the teacher, she is completely responsible for events in the classroom, whether or not she chooses to share her power/control/authority with the students. If, as this book claims, power is the joint creation of all participants, teachers are freed from an excessive and damaging weight of responsibility for classroom events and outcomes. The shared responsibility between students and teachers for what happens in the classroom is brought to light. Based on an ethnographic study of three elementary classrooms, this book offers a careful look at the workings of classroom power. It is of interest both to those seeking to understand power relations from this theoretical viewpoint and to those whose concern is with the daily workings of classrooms, often called classroom management. Questions explored in this book include:
* How do teachers organize time and space in classrooms as part of their contribution to the development of classroom power relations?
* What kinds of discourse choices do they make, and why?
* How do students contribute to defining what will count as classroom knowledge, and how do they resist teacher agendas as they play their part in constructing classroom power relations?

Chapter 1
Introduction

Who has power in classrooms? Most people would say it is the teacher who has power. Willard Waller, an early sociologist of education, wrote in 1932, “Children are certainly defenseless against the machinery with which the adult world is able to enforce its decisions: the result of the battle [between teachers and students] is foreordained” (p. 196).

Waller’s statement expresses the understanding of classroom power that prevails for most people—teachers, administrators, educational researchers—in our culture. It is an understanding that focuses on opposition between teachers and students as well as one that assigns power to the teacher alone.

In this book, you will read about a much more complex conception of classroom power. It portrays students and teachers in power relationships they build together and calls into question common assumptions about the workings and results of power in the classroom.

Underlying Waller’s statement is this belief: The teacher must have the power in the classroom. Let us work out some of what this belief implies. First, it seems to mean that power is something you can have, an object that a person can own. In this book, the understanding of power is quite different: Power is a structure of relationships—a structure in which teachers and students can build or participate. Power is not an object and cannot be owned by anyone. The structure of relationships is called power because it, rather than the individuals who create it, is what shapes people’s actions.

Second, Waller’s idea implies that the teacher is the only one who “has” power. If this were the case, the teacher would also be the only person responsible for what happens in the classroom. Every student action, every bit of student learning, every aspect of classroom activity would be under the teacher’s control; therefore, the teacher would be accountable for every outcome. What a crushing burden of responsibility for a teacher to bear! Yet, this level of responsibility is implied by the statement, “The teacher must have the power in the classroom”.

Teachers naturally look for ways to escape from this burden, but most of these have some negative results. One possibility is to claim that the teacher’s power is overwhelmed by social and political forces outside the classroom—forces out of the teacher’s control. A teacher who tries to limit his or her responsibility by making this claim may, ironically, feel powerless, and give up trying. Another possible approach is to label some students as having disabilities or defects that are not subject to the teacher’s control; this has led to unnecessary exclusion and devaluing of these students.

Third, Waller’s idea indicates that power cannot be shared. The teacher owns power, and if the teacher does not own it, it has been lost. For Waller, if teachers do not win the “battle” he describes, they cannot be teachers. Such a belief requires teachers to focus their attention on keeping ownership of classroom power, often to the detriment of their focus on the needs of students and on the learning.

This book makes the claim that teachers are not the sole owners of classroom power. Instead, it proposes that teachers and students, like any group of participants in a particular context, are jointly responsible for constructing power in the classroom. The teacher is not solely responsible, but instead bears a share of the responsibility for classroom events and outcomes; students make their own contributions, influencing both their own actions and those of the teacher. Understanding power as a matter of relationships implies that power in the classroom cannot be constructed by the teacher alone. How can one individual build relationships? They must be the work of all who participate—both teachers and students.

Our culture envisions classrooms like those Waller describes, in which teachers have power and students do not. This understanding is part of the cultural knowledge that students and teachers bring to school. Unexamined because it is so pervasive, this vision of classrooms permeates the institutional arrangements of schools. For example, teachers are seen as problems if they do not seem to have power—to be in control of their students. Such teachers are more likely to receive assistance or even to be dismissed than teachers whose students do not learn.

The school provides support for teachers in controlling student actions. Students are sent to the office to be punished or scolded by administrators or secretaries; they stand in hallways and receive public disapproval; they serve detentions; they are suspended; in some schools, they receive corporal punishment. Their parents are not surprised to be asked to support the school’s discipline. Also, schools support methods of instruction and assessment based on teacher power and student acquiescence. These include lecture-and-recitation methods of instruction and testing as a method of evaluation.

Because “everyone knows” that teachers have power, not only are many of our practical ideas about classrooms, students, and teachers based on this “general knowledge,” but its implications affect many areas of educational thought (Hustler & Payne, 1982). For example, process-product research about teaching assumes it is what the teacher does that decides what will happen in the classroom, and this assumption has shaped the effective schools movement (Carlsen, 1991). It also permeates classroom management literature, whose purpose is to instruct teachers in those competencies that will make them victors in the battle described by Waller (e.g., Cangelosi, 1988; Duke, 1982; Swick, 1985). Behavioral measures of teacher competency that judge teachers by observing whether or not students are on task and whether direct teacher intervention is necessary to keep them on task, are founded on this same assumption (Morine-Dershimer, 1985). When teachers are criticized for accepting low student effort in exchange for compliance (Sizer, 1984; Sedlak, Wheeler, Pullin, & Cusick, 1986), it is assumed that they have relinquished their power over students.

Because this traditional view of classroom power relationships is so widespread, a shift to an understanding of classroom power as jointly constructed, and therefore shared, calls for significant changes in how we think about many aspects of schooling.

SOURCES OF THIS CONCEPT OF POWER

The idea of power is a familiar one, rich in both political and personal associations. In considering it, I have felt surrounded by varied memories and connections. Here, I want to talk about four different kinds of thinking that underlie the concept of classroom power that I explore in this book. The first is my own experience—as a teacher and a parent—with power and my reflections on this experience. The second is a metaphor of power relationships; the development of this metaphor has been crucial in the growth of my understanding of this constructivist concept of classroom power. The third source is the literature about the concept of power and about classroom interaction. The fourth source is the ethnographic data, collected in three classrooms over a 5-year period, that pushed me to new efforts at understanding how classroom power relations work.

Conflicts in the Arena of Power: Parenting and Teaching

As I began to work with the idea of power, I recognized that this concept has many negative connotations for me. I shy away from the notion of power, as I do from concepts of control, authority, discipline, management, boss, tyranny, even fascism; I am much more attracted to ideas like liberty, freedom, choice, consensus, equality, and democracy. I seek to center my life around the second list and often feel angry, imposed on, or even guilty when I encounter the first. Reaching adulthood in the 1960s, I am part of a generation that valued, or claimed to value, freedom more than power.

Yet, I cannot deny that power is part of my life, of every life. I am subject to the authority, control, discipline, and management of others in many settings. As a parent, as a teacher, as a member of various groups, as an advocate of various causes, I am drawn into situations in which I am powerful or in control. I feel considerable conflict when I recognize that this is happening.

As a single parent of four children (now all adults), I intended to maintain a democratic family, participate in shared decision making, and avoid seeming to be a tyrant to my children. Yet, this often did not seem possible. I needed to protect myself from my children’s demands on my time, my emotions, and my other resources. I was the one with the checks, the credit card, the car; often my “Yes” or “No” had a very different weight from theirs. Also, as an adult, I felt responsible for them; I had knowledge of the world and a concern for the future that they lacked. Looking back, I can see my life with my children as an endless conflict among my own values, centered around the issue of power.

As a classroom teacher for 11 years, in preschool and kindergarten, I again found myself in a quandary as to my own power. I did not want to see myself as a powerful teacher, but as friend and helper to “my kids”—my students. Yet, principals, fellow teachers, and, indeed, I had definite expectations that children would act in prescribed ways. Because all of us were enmeshed in our culture’s understanding of classroom power, it was expected by all that I would have the ability to see that they did.

We expected that these young children would not hurt one another (or their teachers). They would cooperate about matters such as moving from one room to another, using the bathrooms without supervision, and eating and resting with others. When activities were over, they would clean up after themselves. When group activities were planned, they would pay attention and not interfere with others. Also, we expected that they would participate in activities through which they would learn.

Because I was so uncomfortable with the idea of being powerful in the classroom, I naturally moved as much of my power as possible into indirect and invisible modes. If there were things that children had to do, those things would be so well-planned and so much fun that they would want to do them. Learning activities would involve many choices among good alternatives; children would feel that they were choosing what to do. Group activities like reading aloud and singing would be so interesting, so welldone, that they would keep the children’s attention without coercion. If children had to clean up, routines would be established, advance warnings given, and storage systems simplified to ease their tasks. Most of all, I would always speak politely and gently—even while telling children what to do.

Mine was a fairly conscious effort to move classroom management into the realm of indirection and invisibility. It was not an unusual effort. Pick up any issue of the National Association for the Education of Young Children’s journal, Young Children, and you will find articles explaining how to manage children without seeming to coerce them. Usually, my effort was highly effective. Well-organized, happy classrooms were my trademark for years.

However, the last year I taught, before graduate school, was a hard one. I worked with a group of children who were less than willing to let my invisible power work on them. Several had been in school together for the previous 1–1/2 years, and they had some highly effective moves of their own in the arena of power. If it was not quite true to say that they coordinated their efforts, it was certainly true that their timing was skillful. I redoubled my efforts to control them and to keep my control invisible; they were still successful in bringing issues to the surface. They forced me to recognize that my good early childhood teacher moves were really power moves. This reality had briefly surfaced before that year; now I could not ignore it.

When I began this research and worked on ideas of power, I needed to be aware of my discomfort with traditional notions of power. Finding in the ethnographic data those incidents that could be understood as the basis for a nontraditional grounded theory about power, I had to repeatedly ask myself whether or not my aversion to the traditional theory was shaping my thinking in ways that I did not suspect. I could not doubt that the conflicts I experienced as a parent and teacher were one root of my thinking, as I stripped the concept of power of many of its old associations and relocated it in the arena of interaction, of relationship.

Yet, in reflecting on my past experiences, I saw that they might be better explained by the theory of power I was developing rather than by traditional notions. The question was not, as I had felt, one of whether I had power or gave it up. Rather it was one of how my children and I, or my young students and I, constructed together the power relationships within which we lived. Some of my discomfort with memories of past times evaporated as I began to have a better understanding of the ideas I was developing.

A Metaphor of Power Relationships

The metaphors we use in understanding our experiences can often have important effects in shaping that understanding (Lakoff & Johnson, 1980). Traditional metaphors for power in classrooms have named the teacher as autocratic ruler, drill sergeant, factory manager, leader in battle; students have been called subjects, recruits, laborers, soldiers. The metaphor I am proposing is quite different from those. It is more like the conceptions of power developed by Foucault and Janeway, with their metaphors of web and seesaw. According to Foucault (1980), “Power is employed and exercised through a net-like organization. And not only do individuals circulate between its threads; they are always in the position of simultaneously undergoing and exercising this power” (p. 98).

Janeway’s conception of power is as follows:

[Power’s] being is becoming. Its steady existence [is] derive[d] from ceaseless shifts and tensions, its balance is maintained by thrust and response, hope and frustration, and by the practical actions that grow out ...

Table of contents

• Contents
• Preface
• HOW THIS BOOK IS ORGANIZED
• ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
• Chapter 1 Introduction
• PART I NARRATIVES OF CLASSROOM LIFE
• PART II TEACHERS AND STUDENTS CONSTRUCTING POWER RELATIONS
• Appendix Exploring Ideas About Power Relations in Classrooms
• References
• Author Index
• Subject Index