I was completely with the authors, excited to use this critical view of negotiation in my classroom, giving my students agency and power in the classroom and really working together to shape our identities. And then I read a sentence that made me think a little less ideally and a little more realistically. "Critical negotiation ... allows for the realization that some parties may not be interested in compromise so as to maintain the status quo, and that others might be interested instead in disrupting and transforming the status quo" (249). In classroom terms, I will have students who are not from the same background and ideologies as I am and who believe that the way I have attempted to build the classroom community does not work and will want to change it. I am not talking about a student who doesn't want to "have to write so much" or some crap like that. I'm talking a student who honestly want to hold me to the fact that I want to allow my students to craft and take control of their learning and their learning environment. This idea both excited and terrifies me. These students will push me to consistently reflect on my practices and the theories behind those practices, to keep growing as a teacher and as a student and to keep me from creating yet another space where only those who match the status quo succeed. At the same time, let's say a month into the semester, after we've already gotten into the flow of how the classroom works and how we are going to work together, and a student comes to me suggesting a way to radically change the classroom - an idea that would work, but an idea that will both challenge what I have left unexamined in my teaching theory. I know that negotiation does not stop after the first few weeks. I am just wondering what negotiation of a classroom community looks like after that time period. And what type of language does one use with the student who suggests change and with the other students if one decides the change may be beneficial? I imagine that it would look like a conversation with the class, "Someone suggested this plan. What do you all think of it? How would it change our class? What would the possible results of changing/not changing be?" At what point does negotiation stop - or does it? - in a class? Is there a point where the teacher just has to make an authoritative call?
Megan, I am going to need to read the West and Olson piece for sure now. Okay, I am going to try to write out the connection I see between your thinking and mine... not sure how this will work itself out... I see you calling on West and Olson to think about about how students and teachers might shape the classroom together, through negotiation. I also see you pushing beyond a utopian view of negotiation that ignores power.
ReplyDeleteSo... this end thing is I think what I am talking about with negotiation and expertise. Negotiation is never evenly pulled/pushed from either end -the power thing- and I think this is the connection to expertise. Expertise is all tied up in power. Power, assigned or assumed.
So, wowee... where did I get to here? As we negotiate the classroom space, we have to keep asking questions, like you are here, about how our expertise, as teachers, cannot disappear even as it is negotiated.
And let's see, saying that teachers should always negotiate both reifys the idea that negotiation is possible and erases the ways that plenty of others never negotiate. So then the power hierarchy gets reaffirmed. Teachers and for sure students must negotiate, while those with material means to do so can name their say, their stake, their policies, their economics, their packaged curriculum.