Given the Power to Lead, Students Shift Their Classroom From Authoritarian to Adhocratic Governance (Poster 24)

• In Event: AERA Poster Session Friday 3:20 p.m.
  In Poster Session: Student Identity and Autonomy

Abstract

In 2021-2022, while teaching two integrated co-teaching Global 1 history classes in a New York City high school, my co-teacher and I experimented with class discussions as a student-run instructional method. We gave students the power to govern each other academically, socially, and behaviorally as we tasked them with analyzing historical documents. Given this power, students transformed our class governance from teacher hierarchy to democratic adhocracy. Multicultural students shifted hierarchically run classrooms into goal-oriented democratic spaces by sharing roles, upholding norms, checking power, and collectively succeeding. Writing this paper, I seek to remedy and repair the neglect of local, community knowledge and challenge ideologies that frame minoritized students as deficient and in need of inferior, heavy-handed, disciplinarian instructional methods.

Author

• Grace Shih-en Leu, Washburn University