Negotiating authority through jointly constructing the course curriculum

Abstract

Understanding how authority is negotiated in teacher education classrooms can inform efforts to foster democratic teacher education practices and prepare future teachers to teach democratically. We know very little, however, about how authority is negotiated in different classroom contexts, particularly in teacher education settings. This qualitative study examined how authority was negotiated in an undergraduate teacher education course in which I – as the teacher of the course – involved students in actively determining the content, method, and assessment of the course through jointly constructing the course curriculum. Using self-study methodology to understand more deeply the problems embedded in my practice as a beginning teacher-educator, I generated themes from the data using the constant comparative method. The findings suggest that deriving legitimacy from mutually recognized sources, working from shared purposes, and confronting students’ deeply rooted familiarity with authoritarian teaching practices present potential frameworks for negotiating authority in teacher education – while illuminating the challenges of teaching democratically in authoritarian contexts. Such insights are important for helping future teachers experience alternatives to conventional teaching while accounting for the complexity of learning to bring democratic values to life in classrooms at all levels.

Keywords:

• authority
• negotiation
• democratic pedagogy
• teacher education
• curriculum

Acknowledgements

The author is grateful to Tamara Lucas, Cindy Onore, Monica Taylor, Maughn Gregory, Julian Kitchen, and the anonymous reviewers for their thoughtful and constructive feedback on earlier versions of this article.

Notes

1. For Benne, ‘pedagogy’ implies a concern with the schooling of the young, while ‘anthropogogy’ involves a concern with the education and the reeducation of persons of all ages. He therefore coined the word ‘anthropogogy’ to broaden (but not replace) our conception of pedagogy and remind us ‘of the need of human beings at all chronological ages to be reeducated’ (1970, p. 391).