I want to be heard! Classroom echoes of resistance (original) (raw)
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Rethinking Resistance in Schools: Power, Politics, and Illicit Pleasures. Occasional Paper Series 14
2005
Leona, not yet three years old, begins to slide down the small plastic indoor slide. In the middle of her movement, she seems to change her mind and move back up the slide toward the platform on top. As she moves she bumps into three-year-old Sharon. Sharon cries out and Judy, the teacher, calls after Leona, "Leona, what's the problem?" Leona stops and looks at her teacher. Judy says, "Leona, go down, please," as Leona turns back around, facing the platform. She moves her hand to Sharon as if she is about to pinch her. Sharon cries and Judy yells loudly, "Leona! Please go down!" Then Nadia, the assistant teacher, prompts her, "Turn around. Turn around and go down," and Judy says firmly, "No hitting!" Nadia prompts again, "Down…." Leona complies. It is the beginning of the day and not all of the children have arrived at school yet, but Jimmy, David, Dennis, John, and Mark have come into the room with the assistant teachers, Nadia and Dorothy. As if by a prearranged cue, all of the children suddenly begin to move around in a circle in the middle of the room. But they do this without having exchanged any verbal communication. As they move, they increase their speed, until they are running around in a circle, laughing as they move. Twice Nadia and Dorothy tell the children to slow down. The group responds at first, but quickly increase its speed until the children are running as fast as before. These vignettes, and others like them, are interesting because they depict very young children attempting to assert themselves. In a variety of ways, to varying degrees, alone and together, these young children pursue their own plans-plans which might involve escaping one of the teacher's activities, exploring one's own interests that may be in opposition to the rules of the school, or simply acting together with peers where the power of unity can be experienced. We might assume that events such as these occur frequently in the earlier school and preschool grades because the children have not yet been socialized. They have not yet learned the 6 bank street college of education PART I-RESISTANCE AS CLASSROOM DYNAMIC occasional paper series schultz 7 14 bank street college of education occasional paper series bevaqua 15
Children & society, 2008
Socialisation theories have traditionally focused on how children are socialised in a rather unidirectional manner, according to a transmission model. However, more recent research and theories show that children are not just passive recipients, but active agents in their socialisation process. At the same time, children are subordinated to adult control. In school, they are regimented and involuntarily subjected to mass routines, discipline and control. The aim of this study was to explore and give a voice to pupils’ critical thinking about school rules and their teachers’ behaviour in relation to these rules. Ethnographic fieldwork and group interviews with students were conducted in two Swedish primary schools. The findings show that pupils criticise some school rules, distrust teachers’ explanations of particular school rules, perceive some school rules and teachers’ interventions as unfair and inconsistent, perceive no power over the construction of school rules, and express false acceptance and hidden criticism. The findings are discussed in terms of hidden curriculum, power, mentality resistance, democracy, participation and democratic citizenship education.
Representation and resistance in the context of school exclusion: reasons to be critical
Journal of Community & Applied Social Psychology, 2004
In this article an examination of how we, in the everyday, develop critical engagement with the shifting relations of power and oppression around us is presented. The article explores the role of representations in maintaining the racialized patterns of school exclusion in Britain. Social representations theory is used to investigate how racializing re-presentations pervade and create institutionalized practices, how these re-presentations invade young people's sense of self and ultimately how young people collaborate to resist and reject oppressive relations. The material presented here, from interviews with young people excluded from school, and parents, teachers and others involved in school exclusion, illustrates how young people problematize and critique racializing re-presentations while participating in the conditions of oppression and resistance that pervade their experiences of school. The discussion is divided into three sections. The first examines the institutionalization of stigmatizing representations, visible in social practices. The second section looks at the role of re-presentation in the social construction of ‘Black pupils’. The concluding section explores the possibilities of resistance and critical engagement in the everyday. As a whole this reveals how young people develop critical engagement with the re-presentations that filter into and so constitute their realities. This enables an analysis of the role of resistance and contestation in social re-presentation, highlights the importance of participation and community and so invites a critical version of social representations theory. Copyright © 2004 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.
Affective schoolgirl assemblages making school spaces of non/belonging
In this paper I draw on a filmic study with former Australian schoolgirls. I focus on their desire for belonging in secondary school spaces and the ways that belonging was mediated through shame and restricted educational outcomes. This work examines everyday schooling as undergoing a process of affective non/belonging through filmed intraviews (Kuntz and Presnall, 2012). It questions the ways that power relations operate to re/create spatial differences as reductive. Intra-actions re/counted demanded the materialisation of particular types of schoolgirls within marked spaces, demonstrating the making of difference as entangled Baradian (2007) cuts productive of exclusions. Enacting improvisations ‘to fit’ enabled some of the female participants to endure these spaces but others removed themselves from educative pathways. Some bodies were worn down, and others found ease of movement. The filmic methodology employed accounts for shifting ‘multiple instances’, revealing a multiple and conflicting reality (as mattered meaning). The virtual viewer becomes with the research in affective intra-action that is materially consequential. The re/active documentary methodology (Wolfe, 2016a) accommodates a multiple non-linguistic affective recognition of relationality, a sameness in difference. This is a move to a Baradian response-ability that may reconfigure what appears as common sense in education, in the present.
Hidden pedagogies at play: Street youth resisting applied theatre
Over the fifteen years that I have been doing drama work as a classroom teacher with marginalized children and adolescents in public schools and their surrounding communities, I have found that an element of resistance is a natural part of the created learning environment. Youth express resistance in many different forms: ambivalence, aggression, desire, silence, play, repulsion, humour, failure, ridicule and absence (to name a few ways I characterize youth resistance). This element of resistance can range from weak to overwhelming in practice: ignoring others, arriving late or not at all, constantly interrupting, employing improvisational tangents, refusing participation, asking to participate more, continuous joking about, throwing things, and/or expressing oneself with harsh words. In my experience as a drama educator resistance can often indicate moments that lead to comfort and critical thought, possibly even changing the direction of youths' thoughts or action.
School Surveillance, Control, and Resistance in the United Kingdom
The Palgrave International Handbook of School Discipline, Surveillance, and Social Control, 2018
Surveillance, control and resistance in UK schools Anna Carlile 2 the increasing pathologisation of the behaviour of ethnic minorities (Kulz 2014). Their perceived threats to both state security and market capitalism have led to the policing of students' and teachers' identities and critical discourses through the U.K. government's 'antiterrorist' Prevent and Fundamental British Values agendas (discussed below and in other chapters within this volume). All of this has led to an increase in student and teacher stress (Ball 2003; Elias 1989; Keddie 2014; Teague 2014). The response described in this chapter amounts to a harsher approach to discipline and punishment through rising numbers of detentions, seclusions, and exclusions (Carlile 2012; Lloyd 2005; Department for Education 2014a; Department for Education 2015). However, there is potential for restorative justice approaches (McCluskey et al 2008a, 2008b, 2011). Other sources of hope for the future of education will be described towards the end of the chapter. Here, the Equality Act 2010 will be explained as having provided protection for students and teachers who possess specific 'protected characteristics' related to, for example, religion, ethnicity, sexual orientation, gender identity, and disability. This statutory protection will be shown to not simply require a response to inequitable treatment but to mandate an active approach to developing positive relationships between groups. In addition, evidence will be discussed which demonstrates that school students' digital capital allows them to access a range of critiques, making them knowing subjects rather than simply docile bodies (Foucault 1975; Hope 2015). The chapter will include ways in which the current context provides gaps and spaces for the practice of 'critical bureaucracy' (Carlile 2010) as a route towards resistance and social justice in U.K. schools. However, it concludes that this might actually have resulted in a tougher approach to discipline. U.K. SCHOOLS IN A NEOLIBERAL CONTEXT Neoliberalism is understood by the critical pedagogue Giroux, to be a form of ideological market fundamentalism; 'a pervasive and potent form of public pedagogy that operates
Acts of Resistance: Student (In)visibility Acts of Resistance: Student (In)visibility
2020
This paper argues that public school structures are oppressive for all students. Because of racial, class and gender biases, school environments are often especially problematic for African American and working-class/working-poor students. Boys and girls also experience school differently because of gender roles. These intersecting problems include facing dominant narratives based on stereotypes and discrimination. The current study took place in a school building that serves predominately African American and low-income students. The questions examined include: how does school silence children, and how do children resist being silenced? Observational and interview data indicate that children are disciplined into invisibility by treating them stereotypically and consequently demanding uniformity in their behavior as a way to control their mostly colored bodies. Children resist such treatment through creative and collaborative acts that promote their voice and visibility and which cr...
Students’ voices in schools have been historically associated with the chaos of the irrational, immature and irresponsible: to be quietened, curtailed and disciplined. This chaos has been “hidden” through the reinforcement of discursive habits and models of recognition (Deleuze & Guattari, 1994/2009, p. 216) that block, prohibit and invalidate students’ speech and affects. “‘New wave’ student voice” (Fielding, 2004a) has emerged in the past twenty years, framed by its proponents as a “radical collegiality” (Fielding, 1999) that might provide the conditions for “radical interruption[s] to the normal asymmetries inherent in school relations” (Mockler & Groundwater-Smith, 2015, p. 54). In student voice work, students are re-positioned to research issues surrounding teaching and learning. ‘Student voice’ encounters where students, as those “directly concerned” with the practices of schooling, “speak on their own behalf” (Deleuze, in Deleuze & Foucault, 1977, p. 209) in “collective elaborations” (Guattari, in Rolnik, 2004/ 2008, p. 9) might manifest new subjectivities, social relations and environment-worlds in the striated spaces of schooling. At the same time, ‘student voice’ is concept that “zigzags” and passes “through other problems or onto different planes” (Deleuze & Guattari, 1994/2009, p. 18). ‘Student voice’ has proliferated in recent years in school improvement literature as a mechanism by which to increase engagement and school ‘effectiveness.’ In the movement of the concept of ‘student voice’ through the terrains of education, ‘student voice’ has been de- and re-territorialised by capital, sedimented into formations that encourage students to self-style their speech to become diplomatic and their subjectivities to become enterprising (Bragg, 2007; Foucault, 1991, 2007; Rose, 1999). However, these discursive critiques of student voice marginalise the affective, sensory and material movements of student voice work that exceed and escape molar relations of power. This paper maps discursive, affective and material currents as the concept of ‘student voice’ was animated in a low socioeconomic high school during a four-year period where ‘student voice’ was employed as a reform strategy. In processes of participatory schizoanalysis in the final year of the reform, the students and I formed and re-formed collective assemblages of enunciations to create concepts, produce art and analyse the (scientific) variables that constitute and re-constitute the “micropolitical vitalit[ies]” (Rolnik, 2004/ 2008, p. 9) of student voice work. The students’ and my collective theorisations are schizo-analytically intersected with flows of signs and machinic flows in social, political and economic machines beyond the school that shape how ‘voice’ is perceived, interpreted and evaluated. Artistic and philosophical collective assemblages of enunciation about ‘voice’ are juxtaposed with the school’s documented evaluation of the ‘effectiveness’ of the student voice work. It is argued that the molar lines that construct social faces and project specific forms of subjectivities of ‘student’ and ‘teacher’ might be (momentarily) suspended and redirected, even while smooth spaces will not suffice to save us (Deleuze & Guattari, 1980/ 1987).