Breaking through structures of power

Timira

I grew up in a typical patriarchal family in which the men ‘provided’, they made the important decisions, and they got the leg piece in the chicken curry. However, what always took me by surprise, even as a little girl, was my grandmother who orchestrated this patriarchal system. She laboured all day in the kitchen, had no wishes or dreams beyond those four walls, and was content as long as she ensured my mother’s life was always a little unhappy.

I remember her grinding her teeth and muttering under her breath with great disappointment (possibly in herself) every time I served myself the chicken leg before she could serve it to my brother. As a child, I only did this to irk her and be amused by why this would be such a bother, but I get it today.

Power structures work exactly like this. Those who have been victims of oppression cannot perceive the structures that their oppressors have created. They do not perceive themselves as oppressed and their existential experience adopts an attitude of “adhesion” to their oppressor (Friere, 1970). My poor grandmother was a victim of this system.

Revolutionary Brazilian educational theorist, Paulo Freire, in his book Pedagogy of the Oppressed wrote extensively about this. Freire viewed society as a dynamic, ever-evolving system through which power is woven. That power, sometimes intentionally, sometimes unintentionally, oppresses, creating social structures, institutions, ideas, and myths that sustain the wealth, way of life, and power of oppressors. All this comes at the expense of the oppressed. In the context of education, it comes at the expense of knowledge and the process of inquiry.

Power structures in education

Teachers have innate power in the classroom. The fact that they are an adult “in-charge” of a group of young people sets a default power dynamic in favour of the teacher, even if the teacher may not want it! In a teacher-centric system, the teacher ‘teaches’ and the student is ‘taught’, the teacher ‘gives’ while the students ‘take’. There is an assumption that the teacher knows better, so they choose the content to be taught, and they set all the standards, which the student must simply measure up to.

While it may seem that the teacher holds high degrees of power (which, no doubt, they do) we cannot ignore the reality that as part of this system the teacher, too, feels as trapped and stifled as the student because of the rigidity in the structure that they have to work within. In large private  schools, teachers are literally handed out lesson plans that they must thoughtlessly execute, created by individuals sitting in corporate offices, who have little or no experience teaching in a classroom. While in the public sector, politicians and bureaucrats decide what should be taught and banned in the class.

Power structures are complex, layered, and political. While the teacher is an oppressor in one situation, they are victims of oppression in the larger system. In either situation, their autonomy is stripped away to a point that they can’t even see the oppression they face or impose. Making teachers aware of this innate power dynamic in the educational system is imperative if we would like to shift from status quo towards social change.

Theatre practitioner, Augusto Boal, influenced by Freire’s work, developed interactive and reflective theatre techniques in the 1970s, which he called the Theatre of the Oppressed (TO), to encourage audiences to be active participants in order to explore, analyze, and transform the oppression they had accepted as a way of life.

As a trained TO facilitator and trainer, I use Boal’s techniques in my workshops with teachers to better understand power. Teachers experience through the body and dynamic engagements, the imbalance of power between two bodies and the constant tension that it brews between them. It almost immediately brings perspective, and they are able to draw a parallel of how this plays out in the classroom and in the larger education system as well.

While changes in the larger system will always take more time and sustained effort, making shifts and breaking default patterns within our classrooms is not beyond our means as teachers. Reclaiming our autonomy within our own spaces is a good place to begin. Through the body and through TO exercises, teachers identify where in our classrooms we see power and the various ways of breaking or neutralizing it.

Where does power exist?
In the body

Our body has its own language and as someone who is always being watched in a classroom, acute awareness of what the body is saying is a crucial element for a teacher to be mindful about. This is also why preschool teachers are always seen sitting on their knees when they talk to children one-on-one. A stiff chin or simply arms crossed in front of the chest can send shivers down a young spine, while a body leaning against a wall casually can bring immediate ease in a room.

The body carries power, but it also has its own intelligence. By consistently engaging with the body through theatre and the arts, we can hone that intelligence and use it actively and consciously not to oppress but to enable, by knowing when to neutralize its default power.

In space

Spaces hold power too. In an auditorium, the stage draws power while the audience seating does not. However, throw in some differently coloured chairs marked with ‘reserved’ tags in the first row and you suddenly see more power on those seats than the rest of them. This is why most conventional classrooms are arranged in ways where the teacher is always at the head of the class. You will see the dynamic completely change when a teacher, even for just a moment, sits in the seat of a student.

At a school where I recently worked on power dynamics, we decided to reposition the seating arrangement of the classrooms. The teachers realized that conventional rows and columns also had a power dynamic between first benchers and last benchers, so they rearranged it such that students were seated facing each other encouraging discussions and better listening. More importantly, by doing so, the teacher had space to move around the class breaking the default position of power that they held earlier. They realized that the teacher could draw power and attention to themselves whenever they required, from anywhere in the room. This was suddenly a choice and required awareness and objective to be employed. A tangible step towards reclaiming autonomy!

In knowledge

A teacher-centric classroom, where the assumption is that the teacher knows better, projects an absolute ignorance onto the others. This is a classic characteristic of the ideology of oppression, which negates education and knowledge as a process of inquiry.

There is an evident power structure, where “the teacher confuses the authority of knowledge with his or her own professional authority, which she and he sets in opposition to the freedom of the students” (Friere, 1970). Here, there is no room to argue with the teacher, and definitely no tolerance for contradicting points of view.

The flipside to a teacher-centric classroom is a pedagogy based on an antithetical principle where students are more important than teachers a.k.a. the student-centric classroom! Here, the power lies in the hands of the students, where they are regarded as reservoirs of knowledge that needs to be tapped. Here, students decide what, how much, and at what pace they must learn, and of course, they must always be right! This dangerously tips towards becoming egocentric, where the teacher may have to yield too much of their leadership.

Shifting power to the great thing!

Educationist and philosopher Parker J Palmer, in his book The Courage to Teach beautifully presents the idea of a subject-centred classroom, where neither the teacher reigns supreme nor does the student. He says that we must put a third thing at the centre of the pedagogical circle – the subject, which he calls the great thing.

“The great thing is so alive that teacher can turn to student or student to teacher, and either can make a claim on the other in the name of that great thing. Here, teacher and students have a power beyond themselves to contend with – the power of a subject that transcends our self-absorption and refuses to be reduced to our claims about it.”

In a subject-centric classroom, the teacher’s task is to give the great thing an independent voice – a capacity to speak. When the great thing speaks for itself, the tension of power between a teacher and their students organically collapses. A subject-centric classroom does not ignore the student, but it opens up a world larger than their own experiences, egos, and personal boundaries and it is the teacher, who stimulates connections between the subject, the self, and the world, which arises from their passion for the subject.

The great thing!

In the July issue, I had touched upon the idea of power between teachers and students and how dialogue with students brings some semblance of equality in the relationship. I also extensively wrote about the importance of making connections beyond academic objectives and bringing the outside world inside the classroom. How to navigate these conversations is where the great thing lies.

A skilled preschool teacher, through a simple story about a cow causing a traffic jam, can successfully bring to life a world of facts, imagination, social norms, language, numbers, and science. A math teacher, truly passionate about their subject can help you see patterns in almost anything around you. A language teacher will not focus on the meaning of words in a poem but on that one verse, which will reveal the bare truth behind the poet’s intention, forever changing the way you read poetry.

Every discipline has a core idea, an internal logic, a patterned way of relating to the world around it, which is why disciplines are divided the way they are. Science has its own foundational system of thought, just as language does too. Teachers must invest their time in understanding the nature of their own discipline to be able to see it as this great thing that can be honoured rightfully. This is the only way in which our students can be taught “how to think like historians or biologists or literary critics rather than merely how to lip sync the conclusions others have reached” (Palmer, 1998).

Shifting focus on the subject and the nature of the discipline can develop capacities of thinking that have degenerated over decades of systemic oppression. While science should teach us scientific discoveries, it must also teach us the nature of science, because that is what will develop critical thinking. Teaching history cannot only be about the content in our textbooks constantly changing with political agendas, but must be about the nature of how history is written as well. This system of teaching and learning can liberate both the teacher and the student from the oppressive structures that limit access to knowledge, which is where power truly lies.

The writer is an arts-based therapist, educator, and children’s author. She is the former Executive Director of Akshara High School, Mumbai and has been working in the field of education for the past 16 years designing arts-based curriculum and training teachers. She can be reached at TeachersAsArtistsCollective@gmail.com.