Reproducing Educational Hierarchies: Policing “Race” and Class Boundaries Through Surveillance

• In Event: Teaching for Outrage and Empathy: Challenging Preservice Teachers’ Hegemonic Perspectives and Practices

Abstract

Objectives or purposes: The third presenter will engage participants in a dialogical activity to show how schools, like prisons, were designed to control inmates. Jeremy Bentham gave the name “panopticon” to the prison he designed in the 1780s to ensure surveillance of prisoners at all times. This model broke from the methods of discipline and punishment used by previous power elites. It remains effective in public schools, within the current hegemonic, neo-liberal, capitalist, political economy. The presentation activity emanates from recent research, and was designed to sharpen pre-service teachers’ abilities to detect surveillance as a mechanism of power, and its role in shaping identities, academic experiences, “race” and class hierarchies and injustices.

Perspective(s) or theoretical framework: This presentation draws on Foucault’s (1977) idea that power in the modern age operates in subtle ways, invisible to many people, to discipline/control bodies and minds. It also draws on critical pedagogy (Freire, 1993), and critical multiculturalism (May and Sleeter, 2010), emphasizing how hegemonic power reproduces neo-liberal, capitalist, socio-economic hierarchies; and how we can interrupt hegemony through the development of student voice, critical consciousness, dialogue, and community.

Methods, techniques, or modes of inquiry: For a qualitative case study carried out in a high school in South East England in 2007 and 2008, the presenter interviewed ten teachers and observed how hegemonic discourses played out in the teachers’ classrooms and schools. In a current research project at a University of Wisconsin, the presenter and a colleague are interviewing underserved students to find out how mechanisms of power impact their academic experiences.

Data sources, evidence, objects, or materials: The data comes from the responses of teachers and students to the questions posed in the above research studies; from classroom and school observations; and from UK and University of Wisconsin educational policy documents.

Results and/or substantiated conclusions or warrants for arguments/point of view: Surveillance is one cog in the wheel of powerful government and corporate systems of control related to neo-liberal, hegemonic processes. In Britain, the national Labor government under Tony Blair invited corporations to build and run for profit the infrastructure of public schools. The UK study unveiled a school designed like a panopticon, suited to monitoring and regulating student behavior (Foucault, 1977).
The presenter also found that many teachers in the UK and underserved students of color in Wisconsin were unaware of how surveillance mechanisms were policing their minds and bodies. Some underserved students of color volunteered valuable insights as to how surveillance polices/oppresses underserved students whilst privileging white middle/upper middle class students.

Scientific or scholarly significance of the study or work: In pursuing greater educational and social justice it is essential to recognize what “currents” or mechanisms of power operate beneath the social mainstream, driving persistent educational inequalities and inequities. This presentation shows how surveillance communities reproduce “race” and class hierarchies, and undermine the imagination, creativity, intelligence, and autonomy of students and teachers.

Author

• Virginia M. Lea, University of Wisconsin - Stout