Peter’s positions: a diffractive analysis of authority in a year one classroom

ABSTRACT

This article presents an ethnography of the entanglement of space, learning and teaching bodies and pedagogical authority in a primary school in Germany. We focus on the spatial placement of a boy diagnosed with ‘special needs’. Inspired by Carol Taylor’s analysis of a male teacher’s authority at a college. we describe the boy’s changeable seating position first with de Certeau’s spatial understanding of power relations and then with Barad’s agential realism. By conducting this ‘diffractive’ analysis of his performances, we can show how he is subjected to the teacher’s authority and has a remarkable authoritative power himself at the same time. Finally, by focussing on the relationship between the researcher and the boy, we discuss the process of data gathering as it is entangled with the interpretation of data.

KEYWORDS:

• Agential realism
• bodies and space
• diffractive approach
• posthuman performativity
• pedagogical authority

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1 ‘Materialität von Geschlecht und pädagogischer Autorität – Interferenzen von Körpern und Dingen in Bildungsinstitutionen’ funded by the Lower Saxony Ministry for Science and Culture (Germany). Project partners: Leuphana University Lüneburg, Hildesheim University, Braunschweig Technical University. The project compared the interferences between gender, matter and pedagogical authority in primary and secondary schools and engineering studies at College and University in Lower Saxony from 2017 to 2020.

2 All names have been anonymized.

3 The research is situated in the educational policy context of the implementation of the UN Convention on Inclusion to which all schools in Germany have been committed since the 2013/2014 school year. Schools are therefore obliged to accept all pupils, even those with ‘special needs’, and to support them with school assistants if necessary.

4 Furthermore, seen from a perspective critical of adultism, it provides a description not only of Peter’s, but of all students’ positions in the classroom, which become especially perceptible in Peter’s struggles.

5 We refer here to Judith Butler’s (1991, 24–25) concept of the ‘performative’. Referring to John Austin’s ‘How to do things with words’ and the performance-concept of the performance arts, Butler in ‘Gender Trouble’ presents gender as merely ‘performative’ identity: ‘[…] gender proves to be performative – that is, constituting the identity it is purported to be. In this sense, gender is always a doing, though not a doing by a subject who might be said to preexist the deed […] There is no gender identity behind the expressions of gender; that identity is performatively constituted by the very ‘expressions’ that are said to be its results’.

6 ‘Agencement’ in reference to Deleuze and Guattari (1980). The term is commonly translated into English as ‘assemblage’ (Phillips 2006), but we prefer the original term which comes closer to Barad’s approach of ‘Agential Realism’.

7 Tim is Peter’s classmate. He is described by the teachers as an intelligent child who has the ability to be very focused on intellectual tasks, but only if he wants to be. He is also described as problematic, especially for a certain masculinist attitude and his willingness to get into fights.

8 So it was during the researcher’s above-mentioned studies in the field of Afro Brazilian religions, as well. There, it was a lady who has moved there herself twenty years ago from Rio de Janeiro, who introduced him to many important informants. She herself knew how it feels to be a stranger in the need to make contacts. Further, the researcher gained important insights into local distribution of power in regular conversations with a Candomblé-priest, who grew up in the state of Minas Gerais and moved to the area about ten years before the researcher arrived there. This priest stayed in a critical and often controversial observance of all other priests around him.

9 The use of the word ‘temporal’ is due to easier intelligibility. In the quantum universe, the linearity of time, as it seems to be ruling social interactions in everyday life, is broken. Quantum objects are not bound to the past or the future.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Niedersächsisches Ministerium für Wissenschaft und Kultur (Lower Saxony Ministry for Science and Culture, Germany ).