Power and Pedagogy

My Intentions

After 18 years of teaching I took a step back to try and figure out a common thread. Was there something that I can divine from my practice and experimentation that I can use as guideposts. These 4 intentions are what I came up with. I try to keep them in my mind as a guide for my behavior, as a check on my excesses and as encouragement to nudge myself in uncomfortable and unknown directions.

1. Nurture an environment where it is possible to risk an act of love (Freire)

2. Design experiences that “live fruitfully and creatively” in future experiences (Dewey)

3. Create relational power and care. Reject positional power and compliance (Z. Hammond / B. Love, A. Paglayan)

4. Find joy in complexity. Affective And Cognitive. Order And Chaos. Signal And Noise. Joy And Pain. (M. Benasayag, V. Oliveira de Machado, J. Gleick)

The Four Quadrants of Power and Pedagogy

The purpose of my four intentions is to make it more likely that students become positive agents in their own lives. And all students don’t exist in the same world.  And all schooling environments are not the same. These four quadrants are my attempt to distill power and pedagogy into four scenarios, four descriptions of the educational world students are asked to inhabit. I believe that most students, at least some of the time, are asked to live in the bottom left. I believe this is the intentional design of compulsory education in America. I aspire to create the conditions for students, at least some of the time, to live in the top right. This is the purpose of my four intentions.

The Pedagogy Axis

This axis has an opinion. Care is better than Compliance. The simplest definition for the purpose of education, that I can support, is to nurture student agency. The purpose of education is to give students practice, feedback and opportunity for reflection on their decisions. This requires caretaking in support of risk taking. This is the opposite of demanding compliance.

The Power Axis

This axis assumes a progression, a movement from a teacher wielding majority Positional Power to majority Relational Power as the student gets older. Positional power will always have a positive role to play. Good teachers will use their positional power well. Bad teachers will abuse their positional power. Relational power can, of course, also be abused. Good teachers are important. 

The Agency Quadrant

Zaretta Hammond advocates for “culturally responsive teaching as a method for honing cognitive capacity in students and supporting independent learning and agency.” Paolo Freire convinces us that through dialogue we can make and remake the world. Freire understands teaching as praxis. This quadrant is characterized by liberation from oppressive structures that limit students; liberation that enables students to see limits as difficulties they can overcome and not as barriers. Students learn to become independent by practicing independence. Once independent, a student can choose to be interdependent. Without independence, interdependence is just dependence, if not oppression.

The Trust Quadrant

Trust goes both ways and requires both the teacher and the student to believe they are headed in the right direction, towards the student’s agency. This can be difficult for a teacher who sees a student making bad decisions that they want to correct and this can be difficult for students when they are required to make decisions that involve compromise. This quadrant is characterized by a reconciliation of the student's lived experiences with the often harsh and often unjust realities of education and the world. There is an intense push/pull between patience and rigor here and the application of care is the defining characteristic that differentiates this quadrant from the one below.

The Indoctrination Quadrant

This quadrant is characterized by collusion. The teacher’s job is to tell the student how to fit into a perceived and impossibly static current world and the student’s job is to obey so that they might qualify for a tenuous if not mythological future success.

The Dependence Quadrant

This is the craven corner where students are made dependent by their teachers, by the system of education. This is the place where teachers complain that students behave poorly and won’t do what they are told. This is why Teacher Education is so concerned with Behavior Management. This is the quadrant where students are only given the opportunity to survive. This is the default form of education in America. This quadrant is characterized by what Betina Love calls the Educational Survival Complex which demands a student's ongoing dependence on and fealty to an unjust system that is not built for their benefit.