"Teaching" Social Justice: Authority and Coercion in Social Justice Education

• In Event: 34.070 - Critical Perspectives on Constructivism and Progressive Education

Abstract

Objectives

Social justice educators advocate a constructivist approach to learning – emphasizing the autonomous, self-directed construction of knowledge from the learners’ experiences – while also expecting students to develop an explicit critique of the social order. However, the use of a constructivist approach for the pursuit of specific ideological goals leaves educators with a dilemma: what happens when autonomous thinking doesn’t lead to the conclusions teachers advocate? This study examines how teachers and students negotiated the tension between teachers’ authority and students’ autonomy in an undergraduate teacher education course that sought to develop students’ commitment to challenging oppression using a constructivist pedagogical approach.

Perspectives

Progressive educators have long debated the relationship between authority and coercion. While some believed that any imposition on the child constituted a deprivation of freedom (Rousseau, 1762/1921), others argued that a fear of imposition is equivalent to a fear of teaching (Bode, 1938; Dewey, 1916). More recently, critical pedagogues have sought to reconcile these positions by distinguishing between “authority” and “authoritarianism” (Freire & Macedo, 1995), and advocating for a concept of “emancipatory” authority in which teachers both empower students and teach against oppression (Giroux & McLaren, 1986).

However, feminist and poststructuralist scholars have critiqued such approaches for giving the illusion of equality while reinscribing hierarchical relations of power (Ellsworth, 1989; Friedrich, Jaastad, & Popkewitz, 2010), and invisibilizing women’s authority in the classroom (Maher, 1999; Walkerdine, 1989; Weiler, 1991). These tensions in the exercise of authority are particularly salient for teachers who want to promote explicitly ideological social justice values, but avoid being coercive (Applebaum, 2009; Bizzell, 1991). This study adds an empirical analysis by examining how teachers and students navigated the tensions involved in teaching “social justice” while honoring the autonomy of the student.

Data and Methods

This ethnographic study draws on data collected from three sections of an undergraduate teacher education course. The course privileges the construction of knowledge from experience and non-hierarchical teacher-student relations. At the same time, the curriculum is designed to promote students’ commitment to challenging oppression. Data that inform this discussion include classroom dialogues recorded over a semester-long period, semi-structured interviews, researcher field notes, and content analysis of students’ written assignments. Sources were triangulated and analyzed using open-ended and focused thematic codings (Bogdan & Biklen, 2007).

Findings and Scholarly Significance

This study finds that despite the course’s democratic commitments, teachers asserted their authority to dissuade students from exploring ideas that they felt contradicted the course’s social justice objectives. Because students were invested in the course’s constructivist ideals, they found this to be “hypocritical,” as they felt unable to explore their own interests. Ironically, in asserting their authority to advance a social justice “agenda,” teachers undermined their own goals, as students felt less committed to social justice when faced with coercion. These findings illustrate how constructivism’s tendency to invisibilize power relations not only reinscribes such relations but can also be antithetical to social justice teaching. In so doing, this study contributes to research in critical pedagogy, curriculum theory, teacher education, and social justice education.

Author

• Joanne Tien, University of California - Berkeley