Power Relations Within Division of Labor: The Key to Empowering Learners From Marginalized Backgrounds in Classrooms

• In Event: Learning From Learners' Voices: Resistance and Transformative Activism Through Liberatory Education

Abstract

The aim of this paper is to addresses ethnic, gender and social class inequality in mathematics classrooms in the UK by showing how (i) respecting learners’ and their peer groups’ agency and their identifications with mathematics, and (ii) how teachers seeing and valuing such relations can lead to possibly transformative and new learning practices for students from disadvantaged backgrounds. In this paper, I examine youth voices from non-dominant communities through their activities in classrooms, the inherent contradictions between the activities, as well as instances of opportunities that may arise from such contradictions for transformative teaching-learning practices (Vianna and Stetsenko, 2019) with the potential to challenge structural societal ethnic, gender and social class inequalities.

Bourdieu suggests that the field, e.g. a classroom field, is a network of objective power relations between positions taken up by individuals such as students according to the composition of their capital, and those with the right kind of capital are positioned in dominance over others. Cultural Historical Activity Theory (CHAT) rather assumes that these “positions” determine one’s place in the division of labour/exchange for an activity. And these position takings then mediate an individual subjects’/agents’ actions, goals and contradictions between them. Thus, this paper focuses on uncovering the hidden power relations (i.e. the functioning of education capital or power; see Bourdieu, 2011), exposing contradictions between multiple activities within a heterogeneous classroom as a driving force for change (Ilyenkov, 1972) within new transformative teaching-learning activities (Engeström, 1999) driven by non-dominant students’ enactment of agency.

I examine a Year 8 mathematics classroom in an English school with a high intake of students from ethnic minority backgrounds, as well as from poorer homes. In this classroom, there are two dominant forms of activities: the learning activity with the goal to learn mathematical skills, and the second one with a culturally more advanced goal of making friends, maintaining friendships and sometimes even being popular. At times, maintaining friendships or wanting to be popular amongst friends has come at the expense of engaging in the learning activity.

The findings show that the teacher’s recognition of what is valued by the students, even if that may be contradictory to the current educational demands (such as compliance in classrooms), creates opportunities of resistance and opens up new learning opportunities for marginalized students (those who try being popular, as well as academic). However, in some students’ cases, the play of power led to missed opportunities. Thus, we need to unpack the hidden power relations inherent within “positions” to explore position takings and how these mediate the division of labour in classroom activities.

Although Bourdieu’s theory aids the investigation by unravelling the above hidden aspects, there is little room to understand how learner agency can challenge the doxa of the current educational system. A neo-Vygotskian approach that brings Bourdieu and CHAT together enables us to critique mathematics teaching and learning practices in complementary ways.

Author

• Sophina Choudry, The University of Manchester