Power, Resistance, and Subjectivity in an Urban Elementary School

Abstract

This dissertation examines how power is deployed and contested in two classrooms in an urban elementary school. It adopts a Foucauldian framework for understanding power as a transactional exchange in an attempt to illuminate tacit, taken-for-granted school structures and practices. In particular, this study examines how teachers attempt to limit and regulate the behavior of their students, and how students resist their efforts. To understand this relationship, I adopt qualitative research methods, including participant and qualitative observation, interviews, visual methods, and documents. Chapter one defines the problem this study addresses, discusses some guiding questions, and introduces Washington Elementary. Chapter two situates this study theoretically, particularly through a detailed examination of Michel Foucault’s writings on power. Chapter three reviews the literature that informs this study, especially work in the Weberian, authority tradition and Foucauldian scholarship on power as a form of social exchange. Chapter four explicates my methodological positioning and discusses the methods that were employed in generating data for this study. Chapter five reveals how power was applied to the student body in micro-articulations that managed details and rendered the student still and silent. Chapter six examines power relations in pedagogical contexts. Chapter seven looks at the confluence of power and space, specifically examining techniques of isolation and movement at Washington. Chapter eight focuses on the student participants in my study and their position in relations of power, and chapter nine offers a conclusion, including a discussion of this study’s implications and limitations. This study helps to address a critical gap in educational studies generally, namely the paucity of qualitative work dealing with power relations in schools. At the same time, this study addresses the critical relationship between power and subjectivity—that is, how one’s position in a given relation of power forms and shapes the contours of subjectivity. In addition, this study lends empirical validity to many of Foucault’s writings on power, while at the same time complicating others. Ultimately, this study adds to conceptual writings on power and the work of Foucault, and to qualitative studies focusing on social dynamics between teachers and students in schools.