The Reassertion of Traditional Authority in a Constructivist Pedagogy

This paper is a critical ethnographic and discourse study of a graduate teacher education class within an ESL/bilingual teacher education program, in which the professor adopted a progressivist-constructivist pedagogy designed to attenuate the workings of traditional academic authority and to accommodate and empower learners from diverse cultural and linguistic backgrounds. Proponents of constructivist pedagogies tend to promote classroom practices of collaborative education, peer-peer interaction, and methods that distribute (and recruit) knowledge, skills, and responsibilities across people and groups. In theory, in multicultural classrooms, this validates contributions from learners' diverse cultural knowledge and experiences, promotes an environment in which diversity is valued, and broadens the perspectives and understandings of all learners. This, however, assumes that classrooms are apolitical spaces, and that the workings of power and status, while inscribed on larger institutional and community settings, can be suspended within this particular protected environment. This study describes how, in a classroom which enacts a specific constructivist pedagogy designed to address issues of status and power, it is no simple matter to displace traditional practices and discourses. It provides a micro-analysis of the interactions among class members working in a collaborative group, to examine in detail how participants came to take on positions and identities, and the role these played in how meaning was constructed from course content.