Classroom Competencies and Marginal Positionings
- 1 January 1994
- journal article
- research article
- Published by Taylor & Francis Ltd in British Journal of Sociology of Education
- Vol. 15 (3), 389-408
- https://doi.org/10.1080/0142569940150306
Abstract
In this paper we examine the way students are positioned in classrooms in terms of the binary power/powerlessness and its relation to other binaries such as teacher/student, white/black and competent/incompetent student. We show how those positioned in the marked non‐ascendant pair of each binary are assumed, from the perspective of ‘teaching‐as‐usual’ to be choosing (irrationally) their lesser status. We show how this can be read quite differently from a poststructuralist perspective and how such a reading makes visible the ways in which power and ascendant positionings are discursively achieved not only as ‘normal’ but as the way things really are and should be. It further makes visible the ways in which such discursive achievements are dependent on those who are positioned as the necessary other/outsider to the ascendant order.Keywords
This publication has 4 references indexed in Scilit:
- Situated Knowledges: The Science Question in Feminism and the Privilege of Partial PerspectiveFeminist Studies, 1988
- The Perception of Order in Apparent Disorder: a classroom scene observedJournal of Education for Teaching, 1987
- The Role Pupils Play in the Social Construction of Classroom OrderBritish Journal of Sociology of Education, 1983
- ‘We're friends, right?’: Children's use of access rituals in a nursery schoolLanguage in Society, 1979