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PGCE – PRIMARY

LONG ESSAY

THE BALANCE OF POWER AND INNOCENCE:

A REFLECTIVE JOURNEY THROUGH MY

EXPERIENCES IN THE CLASSROOM

ASTJAD001 – JADE AUSTIN

DUE DATE: 31 OCTOBER 2011

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Introduction

We often get told that being a teacher is about empathy, it is about caring and nurturing,

it is about questioning, about learning, is it about challenging and inspiring your learners. In an

ideal world that is exactly what teaching is about. That is how my fellow classmates and I saw

teaching, and still do, to some degree. Teaching is about this but most important and the centre of

teaching, are the learners. It is about the children that sit at their desks in front of you. Teaching

has to do with so many things but we must never forget that at its forefront are those we are

teaching. There is so much about teaching that needs to be looked at and understood before

putting it into practice. The dynamics of teaching. The power of teaching. The innocence of

teaching. It all has to be balanced out, somehow. This all has to be looked at both from the point

of view of the teacher as well as the learners, and it is the learners that I will be looking at here

and their importance and needs when it come to understanding, thinking about and reflecting on

the process of teaching.

Throughout this essay I will discuss, to some extent, how teaching can be looked at like

this, as an ideal, at times but also how we need to fit everything else in too, the other side of

teaching. I will look at how I have experienced teaching in relation to all this and look at some of

the mistakes I’ve made and the challenges I have faced in the ten short weeks of my teaching

practice. I will examine these closely and reflect on my own views inside and out of the

classroom and how it all needs to be balanced out in to be part of one whole. I will look at how

my experiences have shaped me and made me realise the importance of understanding your

learners, thinking about their needs within the classroom and reflecting on how we teach them

and how our beliefs and understandings of things influence them and how they shape their own

ideas.

The innocence of teaching: looking at the balance of how children learn and how

we teach

Teaching can never be done innocently; this is what Brookfield (1995) says in his article.

What does he mean by this? Brookfield (1995) is talking about the implication our actions as

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teachers, have on the learners. How we cannot always comprehend the influence we are having

on the learners within the space of the classroom, and it is this power that the teacher holds

within the learning space. We will come back to this notion of power in the classroom. As a

teacher everything needs to be examined in order for teaching to be innocent, but this is not

possible, how do you examine everything and come up with each and every possibly

interpretation. This is an unfathomable task, one which is simply impossible to always do. To

teach innocently means that we always know and understand exactly what we are doing

(Brookfild, 1995). A way for teachers to not lose all innocence in their teaching is to reflect, to

look back upon ways of teaching and lessons taught, and to understand and question their

methods when teaching. This can be done by looking at the assumptions we make as teachers

and unpacking these assumptions in order to gain a better understanding of the ways in which we

teach. Three assumptions identified by Brookfield (1995) are the paradigmatic assumption, the

prescriptive assumption and the causal assumption. The paradigmatic assumption looks at your

accepted truths as a teacher, the “facts that we know to be true” (Brookfild, 1995). Prescriptive

assumptions look at what we think should to be happening in a given situation, they are

expansions of our paradigmatic assumptions (Brookfild, 1995). Finally causal assumptions are

those assumptions that help us to make sense of how different parts of the world work, and the

surroundings under which practices can be changed. They are looked at in predictive terms

(Brookfild, 1995).

Using these three assumptions we can look at our own practices and ideas about certain

things and reflect on the influence they have in the classroom and on the learners. How our own

assumptions about teaching can take away from the learners and leave us with the accountability

of not teaching for the learners but rather teaching how we think is best, teaching at the learners.

It is important to reflect on how you teach, as this helps you find you faults and question your

own methods, but we also need to look at how learners learn and we need to adapt our teaching

practices and theories in order to focus on the learners rather than on ourselves. There needs to

be a balance between the two, teachers need to improve how they teach just as much as they

need to understand how learners learn. In South African policy, Emily Potenza describes

teachers using seven roles. These seven roles are as follows; a teacher is a “learning mediator”,

as an “interpreter and designer of learning programmes and materials”, as a “leader”, as a

“scholar, researcher, and lifelong learner”, as someone who is an important role model and has

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“community, citizenship and pastoral roles”, as an “assessor” and as a “learning area/subject

specialist” (M. Robinson, & L. Lomofsky, 2010). These describe the roles teachers take on in the

classroom and not necessarily what teachers are. It is important though to remember that these

are roles of a teacher, they do not define the teacher. You need to keep these roles in mind when

looking at your own teaching styles, as they may help you to understand your place in the

classroom. I have found them useful as they have reminded me why I am going into the

classroom, I am there to help the learners, that I am the person who is there to help the learners

gain an understanding and for them to acquire knowledge. It is through these seven roles that I

can assist learners.

There has been a shift in recent years in the way that education is seen, a shift away from

education as a tool of memorising and practice to a view of education as a way to encourage

understanding and thinking (Vosniadou, 2001). This understanding of learning is also stressed by

Piaget, as for him children, or the learners, take an active role in their own learning (Ginsberg,

1981), they are no longer passive bystanders who are told what and how to learn, but rather they

play an important role in their own education, they guide the learning through active

participation. Teachers can also be seen in this light, as they are continuous learners themselves,

they are also active in their own learning. One way that a teacher can facilitate their learning is

through reflection, “the most authentic research activity may take place in the spheres of

reflection” (Ginsberg, 1981). When looking at my own experiences I have found that if the

learners feel needed in the classroom they are more willing to engage with their work. This is

something I noticed during my second teaching practice, I noticed that “there needs to be

responsibility amongst the learners, they need to feel they have a place in the classroom and are

needed outside the learning that takes place. This needs to involve the whole class, if certain

learners are excluded and do not feel a part of the class they will generally be the ones who cause

issues or withdraw in terms of learning.”1 It is important that the learners feel welcome in the

classroom; this will allow them the space to engage with their work and not sit passively as

learning happens around them.

Children learn best through experiences. This is something we have all heard and all said,

and it is true. Looking at this statement now, there is much that needs to be looked at. When we

1 Teaching Practice two Journal, Reflection, p.20, September 2011

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talk about learners in the classroom and them learning through their own experiences, what does

this mean? What kind of experiences are we talking about? Ursula van Harmelen (1998) in her

article on child-centered learning, talks about how this can hinder a child’s learning if a teacher

becomes too focused on the experiences and how and where they should take place. Especially if

these experiences are linked to the nature of the child’s growth and maturation, as in this way

“false limitations” would be placed on a child due to them being ‘assigned’ a bracket in which

they learn best (van Harmelen, September 1998). We need to teach to the child not to the

curriculum and what is being learnt.

Effect of power over human relationships

As a teacher we cannot always comprehend the influence we have over the learners. I

have already said this in relation to the innocence of teaching but now I use this phrase when

looking at the power within the space of the classroom, the relationships between the teacher and

the learners, as well as between learners as peers. Your influence as a teacher greatly impacts the

way the learners will interact with the world and their peers. How do the learners view you as a

teacher? It is important to understand whether or not your beliefs are shared by the learners, is

what you perceive to be good seen in the same way by the learners? (Brookfild, 1995). As

teachers we need to understand how something is experienced by the learners and to understand

the social nature of their learning, “a teacher closing the classroom door does not shut out the

social, cultural, or historical realities of students” (Doyle, 1993 as cited in Brookfield, 1995, p.

12). This describes how even within the space of the classroom there are outside forces

influencing the views of both the teacher and the learners and therefore affecting the relationship

between the two. This affects the power of the relationship that is formed and how these

perceived beliefs influence how one sees the other. The powers of outside forces complicate the

human relationships within the learning environment which in turn affects the type of learning

and how learning takes place. We cannot look at education in isolation, the power complexities

complicated the relationships formed and these two need to be looked at simultaneously.

There is power within the voices of the classroom as well as from those who with hold

their speech. It is important as a teacher to realise your power and use it in order to construct

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meaningful and authentic learning, which challenges the learners to extend from their comfort

zones and discover and understand that which is being taught. It is also important to note that as

teachers we cannot teach that which is unfamiliar to the learner, it is imperative that “any

suggestions we pick up will have to be sculpted to fit the local conditions in which we work”

(Brookfield, 1995, p. 19) and transferred to the learners in a manner in which they can

understand and relate to the context and the content of the subject. We also need to incorporate

the learners’ prior knowledge on a subject matter. We need to remember to let the learners’

control how they receive the knowledge and let them too hold some power when it comes to

their education. The learner is the centre of the learning; no matter how we think something may

be understood we need to think about how the learner sees that topic and how they will make

meaning from what it is that we give to them.

Not everything learners learn within the classroom is taught explicitly. Forms of

understanding and learning take place from cues given and unspoken ideas that often have

nothing to do with the topic at hand. These unspoken ideas and beliefs are picked up by the

learners and they shape the relationship that is formed. We need to be aware of these hidden

messages and how the power they hold influences the power dynamics and the relationships

within the classroom. Something I faced in the classroom during my first teaching practice was

the gender power dynamics in the classroom, those between the girls and the boys. There seemed

to be an underlying notion that the girls were cleverer compared to the boys and this lead to some

of the brighter boys shying away from class discussion and acknowledgement of their own

achievement. This was something that was hard to manage in the classroom, as you want to give

every child a fair chance to express themselves, but some of them would not express themselves

to their full potential as it seemed that they thought what they had to say was not as important or

knowledgeable as others in the class. This is something that still I struggle with, how to even out

the different understandings of the learners and domineering ways of the brighter or more

confident students. Here we can see that something that is not being taught is being learnt and

influencing the power of the relationships, both between the girls and the boys and between the

learners and the teacher.

Finally, a significant thing when looking at power of human relationships within schools

is that of trust. There needs to be trust between the learners and the teacher. If a learner does not

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trust the teacher they will not achieve to their full potential, just as if a teacher does not trust the

learners they will not teach to the best of their capability which will hinder the learning of the

learners.

My mistakes and challenges as a new born teacher

When looking back on my teaching practice, I sometimes find I am searching for

something that is not there. Nothing spectacular happened to me, but through the experiences I

figured out what kind of a teacher I want to be. Teaching practice is a place where we go to learn

and a place where “practical competence” is demonstrated to us in order for us to model and

learn how to teach in a more practical and hands on manner (Mutton, T., Burn, K. & Hagger, H.,

March 2010). It is a space where we can learn how to continue to learn. I will now look at a few

moments from my teaching practices that have made me think. I will look at them and examine

assumptions I have made about both myself and the learners, using Brookfield’s (1995)

assumption outlines, and reflect on how these certain situation have influenced my views of

myself as a teacher. We need to look back and reflect so that we do not make poor decisions and

judgements.

My first mistake, as I walking into my first school, was sinking back into my school days.

Sinking back into a way of thought that gave me the character of the learner, and the staff the

characters of teachers, I was bringing with me preconceptions from my own previous

experiences of which I was the learner. Even though this is true, I was coming into their school

as a peer, or at least soon to be peer. I did not need to sink back into an old mentality that brought

certain actions of submission and doing as I was told. Walking in and not thinking of myself as

one of them was my first mistake. I should have had the courage to learn from my experiences in

my first few days, I should have taken the opportunity to experience this life and to learn to

become a teacher. Instead I accepted my role as a learner and not a teacher learning. I did not

even let them put me into role; I chose my role. This is something I will not do in the future, it is

something that I must consciously work on and remember when I walk into a new situation. I

should not let that situation define me in that space. I should define myself in the space using

cues provided. This is a mistake I have made once, and one I will hopefully not make again, but

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is not the last mistake I’ll make, in fact there are still a few more I need to unravel in order to

learn from my own experiences and become the teacher I want to share with the world, even if

my definition of the world only constitutes a few learners at a time. Being a learning teacher

there are many difficulties of power imbalances and status that need to be dealt with, it is as if

you are in limbo, not a learner in the schooling definition but not a teacher either, you are both, a

learner and a teacher, someone who is learning to teach. It is important to note that learning how

to teach is a complex process which is affected by many outside influences. As already stated

your preconceptions of the education system and how teaching takes place influences how you

yourself will teach, as well as the interrelationship between learning from your experiences and

from the context itself. Experiences teach us about things and how to prepare or react to similar

situations in the future. These experiences though are influenced by your own expectations on

entering a situation and on the responses (including your own) to that experience (Mutton et al,

2010). Through all of this combined we learn how to teach, but the process and the reflection and

examination of the process pinpoints these experiences and how we dealt with them.

One thing that has definitely made me think about my teaching career happened during

my second teaching practice. My relationship with the girls at this school was great. They were a

confident and bright group of grade 5 learners. I allowed myself to become familiar with them,

and probably let them know a little bit much about me. “I do have to be careful ... not be too

friendly with the learners but rather create an open and understanding relationship based on

respect and honesty.”2 This was something I was aware of during my time at the school,

therefore something I reflected on in my journal. One girl in particular stood out for me. She was

an enthusiastic learner, always partaking in class discussions and wanting to share her thoughts.

She also seemed to relate to me better than her class teacher, not so much in teaching styles but

in personality. This can be seen in a number of ways, and it has to do a lot with the learners and

the teacher, not all people get along. This was a situation where now looking back I can see that

how you conduct yourself in the classroom either draws children in or not, and sometimes it

draws some in more than others. This is something that can possibly cause problems that can be

seen by the other learners as favouritism or can lead to dependence of the child, neither of which

is positive for the learner. We need to be aware of how the learners see us as a teacher and be

2 Teaching Practice Journal two, Reflection, P. 20, September 2011

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careful not to over step the boundary and become too familiar. This is something that I reflected

on during my second teaching practice,

“sometimes I think my relationship with the girls is a little casual,

although I have had my moments when in order for them to listen

I have been strict. So the balance between the two is a constant battle,

one that I am not sure I am doing great at. I do though think that you

need to have a casual relationship or friendly in a sense as to be able

to relate to them you need to know about them, and for you to know

about them they need to know about you. Although you can never not

be strict or lapse on the rules as I have seen that the girls take full

advantage of this.” 3

Therefore if a learner has a supportive and trusting relationship with the teacher, they generally

tend to achieve better as they are more comfortable and confident in the classroom environment.

“If a student feels a personal connection to a teacher, experiences frequent communication with a

teacher, and receives more guidance and praise than criticism from the teacher, then the student

is likely to become more trustful of that teacher, show more engagement in the academic content

presented, display better classroom behaviour, and achieve at higher levels academically”

(Rimm-Kaufman, 2011). Learners need to trust their teacher, but they also need to respect

her/him as well. If this is achieved it can promote a desire to learn which then has a positive

impact on the learners academic achievements, this is a part of the hidden curriculum in the

classroom, what else one learns that is not based in the curriculum. Constructive learning cannot

take place in an environment where learners feel unsettled or they feel that they are being

disadvantaged due to other seemingly being advantaged. This would be what Brookfield (1995)

refers to as a paradigmatic assumption. It looks at an accepted truth about what we believe to

create an environment for effective learning. Although it is not always wrong, we need to be

careful in how we interpret this and how it plays out in the classroom. As a whole being in tune

3 Teaching Practice two Journal, Day 24, 30th August 2011

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with your learners is good and having them trust you as a teacher will help them to learn but one

must be careful with such a relationship as not to let learners get too attached, as I have described

earlier, where one learner expects more from this relationship and gives more, which could lead

to an unhealthy relationship with the learner. This is hard as we want to help them and we care

about them but in the end we are their teachers, and that relationship must stay as a positive

teacher-learner relationship and not become too personal as that in itself may affect the other

learners as well.

Another of the challenges I faced during my teaching practice, was something that was

pointed out to me during my second teaching practice. I seem to teach in a traditional way. In the

sense that I stand in front of the class and direct discussions during teaching, and that as a teacher

I cause learning to occur. I had not thought of my teaching in that way as my ideas involved

more creative and learner centre tasks, so for my teaching to be described in such a way, I was

quite shocked. A traditional teacher sees themselves as the sender of the information and the

learners as the receivers (Damodharan V. S. & Rengarajan.V, 2007), and is also known as the

‘chalk and talk’ way of teaching. After this was pointed out to me, I took more notice and tried to

change up my teaching style. This relates to what I had discussed in my journal, about how each

teacher teachers in a different way;

“we are discovering our own styles and how to relate it to the children

we are teaching. I think depending on the class and the school influences

how we teach and how we interact within the classroom. Every new environment

and experience shapes us further and we learn from these times, and during

this TP I feel as if I have learnt a great deal from my mistakes and from the

other UCT students and the teachers at the school.”4

As a teacher you find yourself comfortable with one way of being and struggle to change. This

got me thinking, as if I could not learn to change now, I will end up teaching the same way for

many years to come, and this is not the kind of teacher that I want to be, I wanted to inspire my

learners, not let them sit by passively as I feed them information. I did not wholly agree with this 4 Teaching Practice to Journal, Reflection, September 2011

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observation of my lessons as I enjoy interacting with the learners and getting their ideas and

thoughts on subjects, but I did notice that I controlled the discussions and the information the

learners shared. If we look at learning from Piaget’s point of view, we see learning as active

participation, where “knowledge is constructed by the child: ‘to understand is to invent’”

(Ginsberg, 1981). Using this understanding, the teacher is merely the guide for the learners, to

show them the direction and let them rediscover the matter for themselves, therefore placing

more emphasis on the active engagement and learning of the learners themselves (Ginsberg,

1981). This directly contradicts the understanding of traditional learning which portrays the

learner as a passive participant in the process of education and learning. This links in with the

causal assumption, how I think about the way I teach is predictive, it relates to the conditions of

my classroom and how you would expect it to be managed (Brookfild, 1995). I become more

aware of trying to change up my lessons, taking note of how others taught and modelling them to

some degree. Learning from other people is an important part of teaching; I need to be careful

though as not to become something else and to still stick to what I am comfortable with. While

teaching I also tried to gauge my learners and see what encouraged their learning, how they

responded to different ways of being taught. For my second teaching practice, I found that they

enjoyed discussing openly a topic, especially when they had some background knowledge on the

subject or if the topic was interesting and related to something else they were familiar with.

Although this was not ideal for all the learners as some were not comfortable to talk about things.

They preferred to have had a few lessons prior to the discussion in order to feel comfortable with

the topic at hand. Sometimes these discussion sessions could get side tracked, as with primary

school learners, especially girls, they like to relate what they are doing in the classroom to their

own experiences, not matter how small the link may be.

Lastly, one thing that struck me during my time in the classroom was the importance of

structure, especially with young learners. If there is no structure, less work seems to get done, as

there is always some other time when they can finish previously started work. This was one

contradiction between my two schools. During both teaching practices I was in a grade 5 class,

the first one was highly unstructured with only a brief outline of work that needed to be done at

some point during the week, and my second teaching practice that was more structured but not to

the degree that creativity was challenged or nonexistent. “The structure of a classroom affects the

inter-personal dynamics, which in turn affect learning” (Polityka, 2002). The following is an

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extract from my first teaching practice journal and how I saw the need for structure in the

classroom.

“I am someone who likes structure and order. I like to be organised,

especially when I feel unsure about something. The way the classroom

was run just did not gel with me. There was disorder when it came

to the differing subjects; subjects were not separated into different

time slots, but rather depending on the level of the individual learner.

Therefore in an hour time slot learners could be working on Maths,

Afrikaans and English for example. I liked the way the teachers had

integrated the subjects or learning areas but this disorder in when each

was taught. I did not like so much and I struggled to keep track of how

often they had done a certain learning area or neglected another.”5

Structure creates the environment of the classroom which is the learning space of the learners. If

there is chaos or lack of direction the learners may see this as a lack of authority of the teacher

and start to bend other rules, as none are enforced within the space of the classroom.

Something else that I noticed during teaching practice was that I was more knowledge

focused where I probably should have been focusing more on the skills I was teaching. I planned

lessons based on content and not on what I should be teaching the learners. Not all that I did was

a challenge, there were some good moments too where lessons worked out and I think it is

important to look at these moments to and reflect on them in order to improve or base more

lessons in a similar manner. One lesson, or group of lessons that I did think went particularity

well during teaching practice was a history lesson on the provinces of South Africa, where the

learners were provided with information that they used to extract key points from and summarise

them into a mind map form. It was an introductory lesson to the topic and was a nice way for

them to get a general understanding of the provinces. They presented these posters/mind maps to

the rest of the class, telling them about their specific province. If I look at this lesson, the

importance of the lesson was not so much on what they learnt in terms of context but the skills of

5 Teaching Practice one, Journal Summary, May 2011

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summarising given information into key points. Even though the learners did learn some content

knowledge they also learnt skills that are important. This illustrates one lesson where I tried to

extent myself and the learners and not focus primarily on the content.

Concluding thoughts

The examples or experiences I have shared here, may seem like a bunch of miss matched

experiences and challengers, but they are the ones that stick out for me. The ones that ultimately

will shape me as a teacher in the future. They may not be linked in any sense but it is these

experiences that I have learnt the most from and discover what it is actually like to be a teacher.

It is these experiences that have allowed me to reflect and understand the process I have been

through and how and why I have come out the other end with the thoughts and ideas I have.

We need to remember why reflecting is essential. Brookfield (1995) points out six

reasons why reflection is so crucial when it comes to teaching, it helps us to take “informed

action”, to “develop a rationale for practice”, to “avoid self-laceration”, it ‘grounds us

emotionally”, “enlivens our classrooms” and “increases the democratic trust” within the

environment in which we work. All of these reasons need to be remembered when looking at

your experiences and reflecting on them. I have tried throughout this essay to link these in with

my own experiences, to improve how I will teach in the future. I have also shown the

significance of the learners in the process of reflection, that we need to remember them when

looking at how we teach, as it is for them that we are teaching. There needs to be a balance

between these two, between the teacher and the learners within the classroom. There also needs

to be a balance between teaching as fun and exciting and the importance of what is learnt within

the classroom, the content knowledge. At the centre of all this is still the learners. I have shown

that in some of my experiences I have probably not thought about the learners as much as I

should of, but I rather was focusing on my own learning. This needs to be remembered too as we

as teachers are also learners, constantly learning from others and our own experiences.

From this we can see the need for reflection in teaching, and how the assumptions we

make influence more then we may think. How they influence the learners and their learning as

well as our own. As a teacher I need to learn to balance out the power and the innocence within

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my classroom, I need to incorporate the learners into this process. I need to find a way to

improve my own understandings about the world in order for me to be a better teacher for my

future learners. It is through the continuous process of reflection that I hope to achieve this.

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Reference List

− Brookfild, S. (1995). Chapter 1. In S. Brookfield, Becoming a Critically Reflective Teacher (pp.

1-27). San Francisco: Jossey-Bass.

− Damodharan V. S. & Rengarajan.V. (2007). Innovative Methods of Teaching. Learning

Technologies and Mathematics Middle East Conference , (pp. 1-16). Sultan Qaboos University,

Muscat, Oman.

− Ginsberg, H. P. (1981). Piaget and education. In I. E. (Eds.), New directions in Piagtian Theory

and practice (pp. 39 - 54). Hillsdale: Lawrence Erlbaum.

− Harmelen, U. v. (September 1998). Is learner centred education, child centred? Journal for

Educational Reform in Namibia, Vol. 8 , 1 - 10.

− M. Robinson, & L. Lomofsky. (2010). The teacher as an educational theorist. In J. d.-K. L.

Conley, Becoming a Teacher (p. 49). Cape Town: Heinemann.

− Polityka, M.-A. (2002). The Effects of Classroom Structure on Student Learning in Introductory

Physics. Retrieved October 25, 2011, from Laboratory of Comparative Human Cognition:

http://lchc.ucsd.edu/nfinkels/map.phys199.pdf

− Rimm-Kaufman, S. (2011). Improving Students' Relationships with Teachers to Provide Essential

Supports for Learning: Teacher’s Modules. Retrieved October 25, 2011, from American

Psychological Association: http://www.apa.org/education/k12/relationships.aspx

− T. Mutton, K. Burn & H. Hagger. (March 2010). Making sense of learning to teach: learners in

context. Research Papers in Education, Vol 25, No. 1 , 73 - 91.

− Vosniadou, S. (2001). How Children Learn. Brussels, Belgium: International Academy of

Education (IAE).

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avoided all forms of plagiarism mentioned there.

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4. I have referenced all quotations and other ideas borrowed from others.

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