New Scenes of Equality: Using Rancière to Disentangle and Declassify Ourselves From Teaching-as-Usual

• In Event: Taking Rancière to School: An Impossible Curriculum

Abstract

In this paper, I use Rancière’s account of radical equality and theatrical politics to restage selected scenes from classrooms that help us to imagine what it might mean to practice equality as a presupposition, as staged, and as dissensus. With Rancière, I want to enter the messy spaces of classrooms to see if we might find moments where “politics rises from below” – or moments, where the “unintelligible” presuppose and stage their own equality, and where this equality interrupts the school order of classification as dissensus. In Rancière’s (2009) words, I want to document those “moments when the power of anybody emerges most significantly” (p.118).

Rather than using these “new scenes of equality” to claim a better vantage point or to propose a new pedagogy, I instead try to use them to begin an intellectual adventure in which my primary goal is one of “trying to see how [I] see” (Lather, 2007, p.161). As a university supervisor over the past five years who must be vigilant about documenting and helping to produce scenes of “good teaching” (Davies, 2000), I know how to look for coherence and continuity. In fact, it has actually become routine, I have noticed, for teachers to "police" my observations -- to ask me to not look at certain children who might soon intrude upon the pages of my official observation forms – students who have been assigned to categories of deficit and failure and who presumably should not “count” in my evaluation of whether or not the intern has been able to produce a scene of “good teaching.” Thus, in my role as eternal (and emancipated?) spectator, the question of how to achieve “good teaching” has turned into a very different question – a question of what can be seen, heard, and said – and what (and who) must become invisible, inaudible, uncounted – in the classroom. By staging "new scenes of equality", I try to disentangle or declassify myself from “teaching-as-usual” (Davies, 2000) and the limited interpretation of teachers and students it allows.

Learning to see and perceive differently is much aided by how Ranciere helps me to think about stories that continually disrupt our field of vision by inserting discontinuity into what would otherwise be coherent scenes of schooling (Ellsworth, 1997). I am especially interested in how this work might represent our best chance to transform our ways of knowing and doing with students who have been increasingly and problematically categorized into various categories of deficit or failure. In short, this paper explores my interest in engaging in truant ways of reading and showing what teaching looks like when I attempt to change my reading route and try to view teaching from an assumption of equality.

Author

• Meredith Whittaker