We Make This Road as We Walk Together: Sharing Teacher Authority in a Social Action Curriculum Project

Abstract

This article investigates issues of teacher authority and student initiations in a classroom-based social action curriculum project. A teacher (the first author of this article) and his fifth-grade, African-American students conceptualized, designed, and carried out a seven-month–long integrated curriculum and campaign to lobby for a sorely needed new school building in their public-housing neighborhood. (A new school had been promised to the community six years earlier by the board of education.) In the current era of high-stakes testing, teachers are often forced to use prescriptive curricula and are certainly not advised to follow student interests or concerns, especially those teaching children living in poverty. The teacher in this study, however, opted for a curriculum designed to not only teach ideas of democracy, but to also practice direct democratic action. Throughout the article we study the particular instructional and pedagogical practices of the teacher. By analyzing the affordances of the curriculum in relation to democratic participation, we show how the curriculum engaged students in the practices of problem posing, problem solving, and decision making. Throughout the article we explore how authority for classroom process and knowledge were shared by teacher and students, and focus on opportunities the students had to direct the project and classroom curriculum.

Notes

Notes

1 We use pseudonyms for all children.

2 The Collaboratory Project is an initiative of Northwestern University that provides training, technological services, and resources to assist teachers and students in developing Web-based projects and activities. The free-of-charge and easy-to-use Web-based technology helps to further educational achievement in a collaborative and secure Internet environment. Brian worked extensively with his students in this Web-based environment. He developed a mentor model linking university graduate students to elementary students in an effort to provide individualized feedback to all of his fifth-graders on a daily basis. Each of Brian’s students was matched with a writing mentor (a doctoral student studying literacy at a university over 700 miles away) who would provide feedback to the student. The mentors assisted their elementary counterparts with writing and provided input and insight to the student efforts, particularly regarding the fifth-graders’ fight for a new school building. More information about the Collaboratory Project can be found at http://collboratory.nunet.net.