Putting Foucault to Work: Understanding Power in a Rural School

Abstract

This case study uses the work of Michel Foucault to challenge the normalization of the principal's role and to examine the complex power relations of a rural school and community in the midst of a closure/consolidation and subsequent reopening as a charter school. In so doing, we move beyond analysis of best practices and toward a more theoretical approach to understanding the social interactions and subjectivities that constitute one rural school and its leadership. The analysis challenges commonsense assumptions that schools operate in neutral ways and that “best practices” exist outside of social and cultural constructs.

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Notes on contributors

Carrie Freie

Carrie Freie is Associate Professor of Education at Penn State Altoona. Her research uses qualitative methodology to study educational settings. Her areas of interest include social class, race, and gender as they intersect with student identities, student retention, and pedagogies. She is the author of Class Construction: White Working-Class Student Identity in the New Millennium.

Karen Eppley

Karen Eppley is an Associate Professor of Education at Penn State University where she teaches language and literacy courses. Her research interest is the intersection of literacies and rural education. Specifically, she is interested in rural teacher preparation, situated and multiple literacies, place-based pedagogies, and textual representations of rural life in print and policy.