Spring 2009 - my first semester as a "teacher:" I walked into my very first Eng 090 classroom at Pueblo Community College, so nervous I couldn't remember if I even actually spoke English - how would I presume to teach it?
23 faces stared at me with varying degrees of trust and friendliness as I handed out syllabi and explained department policy. Then, as I had carefully pre-planned, I asked the class to take out pen and paper for a free-write exercise. At the mark of my completely un-empowered word, all at once, 23 people reached for notebooks and pens and began to write like robots. It was one of the most surreal moments of my life.
In Language & Symbolic Power, Pierre Bourdieu "portrays everyday lingquisic exchanges as situated encounters between agents endowed with socially structured resources and competencies, in such a way that every linguistic interaction, however personal and insignificant it may seem, bears the traces of social structure that it both expresses and helps to reproduce" ("Editor's Introduction" 2).
In other words, though those students didn't know me from a hole in the ground, even the people who glared distrust at me from the minute I walked to the front of the class did exactly what I asked of them because of the "complex [and powerful] historical process" (5) developed in this country around the idea of "teacher" as signifer. It was "habitus" - what Bourdieu sees as a "set of dispositions which incline agents to act and react in certain ways" (12) - that "entitled [me] to speak in the circumstance" (8). They listened because 13 years (more or less) of public schooling inculcated them with specific actions and expectations. I, on the other hand, found myself in a situation "[lacking] congruence", in which I was unsure of exactly "how to act and was [at least for a while] lost for words" (17)
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I think we have a moral obligation to our students to not abuse the assumed power relationship of teacher-student. I keep thinking back to the Elbow and Bartholomae debate over teaching writing. Elbow doesn't seem to set himself up as the authority but instead turns the power over to the student.
ReplyDeleteThe role reversal that first semester of teaching is a bit mind-boggling, isn't it?
ReplyDeleteAnd as Bordieu points out, those students are engaged in this complicity of "violence" of writing like "robots". Interesting when you think of it that way. Easy to see how some teachers could go on a power trip and enter into an abusive mode.
ReplyDeleteAfter six years in front of the classroom I still find myself constantly aware of how little power I actually have without their giving it to me. I have exactly the amount of power students are willing to provide. Without those historical traditions, right or wrong, this teacher wouldn't have lasted two weeks much less six years.
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