Teaching and learning par Tabulawa last.indd

In Chapter One, I observed that one of the effects of technical rationality on research on teaching has been the tendency to focus almost exclusively on what the teacher does in class, rather than on what students also do to influence classroom practices. Students, it appears, do not matter really in classroom processes and curriculum implementation. This thinking suggests that their behaviour will change as and when that of the teacher changes. The thinking is perfectly in line with the logic of both process-product research and behaviourism – typically, students are portrayed as ‘passive recipients of academic verbal information’ (Prophet and Rowell 1993:205), which implies that they do not make any worthwhile contribution towards the shaping of the observed classroom practices. Where students’ contributions are accepted, they are described as ‘fairly artificial [comprising] short responses to closedended teacher-initiated questions’ (Marope 1995:12). To use a popular metaphor, students are ‘pawns’ that merely respond, in a rather mechanical manner, to the teacher’s actions. This chapter makes a critique of this position through the presentation of findings from a study in which students were observed employing both subtle and overt strategies to keep their teachers in an information-giving position. The findings challenge the pervasive view that ‘teacher dominance’ of classroom activities is a product of the teacher acting on the students. Rather, teacher dominance results from teachers and students exercising power on one another. To this end, I argue that students make great input in classroom processes to the extent that they significantly influence the way a teacher carries out his or her teaching tasks. At the centre of this argument