Reconstructing authority: Negotiating power in Democratic learning sites

Composition Studies, Spring 2001 by Spigelman, Candace

I am greatly attracted to peer relationships in the teaching of writing: I used writing groups in my composition classes before they were popular; I directed a learning center where "knowledgeable peers" offered various kinds of writing assistance; and last year I introduced classroom mentors into my basic writing class. One reason I emphasize peership activities has to do with my own discomfort with too much classroom authority. Yet I appear to be in good company, for as Susan M. Hubbuch points out, academics in general and writing instructors in particular tend to feel guilty about assuming power, which to all of us "smells of coercion" (35). Rather, we want to empower our students, often by way of collaborative, community-fostering activities. Furthermore, the social turn in composition encourages writing teachers to model more democratic activities in hopes of training students for participatory democracy. We want to resist authoritarian classroom arrangements because we want students to be active in their education and in their lives. We see that peer relationships are, in Kenneth Bruffee's words, a "powerful educative force" ("Collaborative Learning" 638), a force recognized by John Dewey in the general education of children and espoused by compositionists representing a range of pedagogical and political perspectives, including Bruffee, Peter Elbow, Stephen Fishman and Lucille Parkinson McCarthy, Andrea Lunsford and Lise Ede, John Trimbur, and Greg Meyers.

But what is actually demanded of us or expected of our students when we attempt to de-center the university classroom? Can we truly shed the mantle of authority? According to Hubbuch, instructional authority is necessary for students' academic achievement: students depend on understanding particular teacher expectations in order to fulfill their roles as learners. When we frustrate or constrain students' dependency role by asking them to share our authority, we tip both the cognitive and the psychological scales, which, ironically, may "render the student incapable of learning... [and] render the student powerless" (40). In a similar vein, Russel K. Durst addresses the pragmatic needs and expectations of many students attending college today and examines the conflicts that ensue because composition's cultural studies focus often appears at odds with these expectations. In Durst's view, most students want their teachers to assume central authority in the classroom. Furthermore, Lad Tobin argues that our de-centering efforts and methods may exacerbate, rather than resolve, power imbalances by driving them underground. In democratic classroom settings, competition for grades and instructor approval remain unacknowledged forces, which ultimately sustain teacher power. Andrea Lunsford observes that students usually expect instructors to enact exclusionary, individualistic, judgmental forms of control, and may actively resist less oppressive instructional methods. Recognizing the historical, social, and cultural forces that support traditional views of classroom relationships, Lunsford states, "We shouldn't fool ourselves that creating new models of authority, new spaces for students and teachers to experience nonhierarchical, shared authority, is a goal we can hope to reach in any sort of straightforward way" ("Refiguring" 71). Indeed, college writing teachers often find that even more circuitous efforts to refigure authority are confounded.

In the discussion that follows, I want to add another layer to the already complicated problem of power relations in democratic classrooms that Lunsford suggests. I will describe my efforts to develop a "new model of authority, a new space," using peer group leaders, advanced standing students who facilitated writing groups in a first-year basic writing class and who met with me in a weekly seminar. I will draw upon learning center theory to account for the student mentors' positionings within their groups, their group members' constructions of their authority, and their conflicted status in the seminar class. I will show that in these democratic classroom settings, power was repeatedly resisted, negotiated, and recentered among students in both groups and between the peer group leaders and me. I will argue that, like traditional models, our newer practices are subject to institutional figurations that continue to concentrate power in teachers and limit students' authority at every level and instructional site. Thus, together with their students, writing teachers must continue to critique and interrogate each new effort to achieve shared authority even as they create more circuitous paths.

Peer Group Leaders and Basic Writers

Last year, with support from a Penn State University grant from the Center on Excellence in Learning and Teaching, I created a set of linked courses designed to promote peer collaboration in a basic writing class while introducing prospective teachers to writing theory and practice. I designed the project because I was committed to writing group pedagogy but also recognized the limits of peer group activity: oftentimes, inexperience with group work, insecurity about their own writing skills, or social concerns constrain basic writers' active participation (for analyses of peer writing group problems, see among others, Spear; Brooke, Mirtz and Evans; Roskelly; Berkenkotter; Leverenz; Goodburn and Ina; Spigelman). My Peer Group Leader seminar placed five specially selected, sophomore education majors in a section of basic writing that I was teaching. During class time each Friday, these peer group leaders joined the same group of 3-4 developmental writers to discuss their essay drafts and also to discuss topics or readings relevant to their writing. In addition, they met with me weekly for a 75-minute seminar, where they learned to facilitate workshops and to conduct group tutoring sessions. In the seminar, they also assessed their weekly writing group's progress, problem solved, and planned strategies for upcoming group meetings. By introducing peer mentors into my basic writing class, I hoped that my developmental writers would benefit from a more student-centered classroom environment, where textual authority was vested in the student writers and their readers, rather than in me as the writing instructor.