Juanita D. Price and Carolyn Cutler Osborne
We are two writers who come from very different backgrounds and who have united in a project to help people understand how authority works. The ideas in this paper about authority come from Juanita D. Price. Born before the Civil Rights movement, Juanita has never known the institutional forms of authority which accrue in our culture to middle and upper class white males. As a battered wife before the existence of domestic violence shelters, she did not have access to authority within her marriage. She did not have support from institutional forms of authority within the justice system as she coped with the violence of that relationship, since this relationship took place before battered women's court and legal advocates existed.
Over the course of her lifetime, and particularly within the crucible of that violent relationship, Juanita has discovered where she does have authority--over her own self. Juanita changed the violent relationship she had with her husband by using the authority she found within herself. She began to not cooperate with the unspoken limitations she had placed on herself in the course of coping with her husband's violence. For example, in response to his mood upon coming home from work, Juanita had begun to avoid him through finding work for herself in the furthest place from the front door of their house, either the attic or the basement. She was trying to put off as long as possible the inevitable moment of their seeing each other. As Juanita began to recognize personal forms of authority, she realized that she had to quit limiting herself; she began to fully exercise a newly discovered element: personal authority.
One day when her husband came home, he found her waiting just inside the front door. She was not hostile or mean. But that shift in her behavior, her taking authority over her right to be anywhere in the house, began a shift in the relationship between the two. Juanita continued to use personal authority strategies to reinforce the shifts she began that day. Her husband resisted the changes, but he was not able to push Juanita back into her old ways of running from him. By the time Juanita left the relationship, she knew that she would be safe, that she would not be, as we would say today, "stalked" by him because he had found out how useless his attempts at authority over her had become. The shifts Juanita made in her relationship through using personal authority were not easy and the full story of these shifts is complex. The ideas which Juanita developed about personal authority have many ramifications, not only for ending oppression of various sorts, but also for creating positive working and learning situations.
Carolyn Cutler was born white, middle class, and into a family that valued both formal education and life-long learning. Luckily for Carolyn, her family's value system helped her to recognize the teacher in Juanita. Carolyn has spent the past thirteen years applying Juanita's ideas to work in several settings, including a battered women's shelter which Carolyn directed, and, more recently, a writing classroom in which Carolyn taught.
Kinds of Authority
With recent shifts towards "student-centered" classrooms, there comes a paradox in relation to authority: how do teachers "release" authority to students over their own writing and yet still remain teachers--the people who are ultimately responsible for what happens in the classroom, including the quality of learning that takes place? This paradox is a result of a particular view of authority (control) as a kind of zero-sum game in which "giving" students some kind of control over their own work subtracts the amount of control a teacher has over the classroom. Those who support traditional approaches to teaching and learning base their criticisms of student-centered classrooms on this zero-sum game approach to authority. The purpose of our article is to articulate, in the context of a writing class that Carolyn taught, some of Juanita's understandings of structures of authority which bring the concept of authority away from the zero-sum game notion.
Authority implies some kind of control. Yet there are two kinds of control that are significant: Positional Authority (the kind of control which is granted by an institution) and Personal Authority (the kind of control which each person has over self). Each of these types of authority does different things and both can and should be operational in the classroom.
Here is a simple example of the difference: a teacher of fourth graders is in a position of authority over the students in the class. The teacher controls the overall classroom schedule and the kinds of subject matters with which students will engage. Yet even the most autocratic teacher does not control every aspect of the students. The students have control over their own bodily functions (unlike pre-school children who must be reminded by an adult to go to the bathroom, for example). Personal authority, then, exists in even the most teacher-centered classroom. What is key is that students' personal authority can be more fully activated in the process of creating an environment that is conducive to teaching and learning.
When Carolyn began teaching a writing class to university undergraduates majoring in Elementary Education, she decided to work with both kinds of authority in structuring the class. She wanted students to exercise personal authority in relation to their writing while she retained the positional authority of being a teacher. The following chart describes some of the differences between the two kinds of authority in Carolyn's class:
| Positional Authority (Teacher) | Personal Authority (Student) |
| •Controls the activity of the students (this is a writing class therefore students will write). | •Controls many aspects of writing--usually the subject matter, genre, voice, and use of writing process. |
| •Controls the time frame of the class--makes the schedule and is responsible for sticking to the schedule as much as possible. | •Controls how certain blocks of time will be used (e.g., how the writing workshop block of time will be used). |
| •Controls the experiences to which the students are exposed--in the interest of providing experiences that support writing. | •Controls own interactions with classroom experiences--level of emotional involvement, how much the experience is embraced. |
| •Controls authoritative interventions when students' use of personal authority fails. | •Controls self such that one's own behavior does not interfere with the needs of the community. |
| •Controls the set-up of assessment activities and is responsible for meeting the assessment needs of the institution. | •Controls much of the content of the assessment process, including self-assessment and goal setting. |
To boil this chart down into simple terms, class requirements constitute positional authority while choices indicate personal authority.
Classroom Activities
The university authorized Carolyn (placed her in a position of authority) to teach a writing class. In structuring the class, Carolyn decided to use a writing workshop approach, based loosely on Nancie Atwell's work. The class met twice a week, for 2.5 hour sessions. Approximately 35 minutes to 45 minutes of each session was devoted to writing workshop. Students who were very much engaged in their writing often continued to work during the break that followed writing workshop. During writing workshop, students were free to choose what they would write and how they would do it. They were free to engage in any part of the writing process. The central requirement, from Carolyn's position of authority, was that they write.
Class Schedule
One of the misconceptions that people might have about student-centered classrooms is that "anything goes," as far as scheduling is concerned. If this were true, this would be an abdication of the teacher's position of authority. As the school term progresses, there seems to be so many other things to do--projects to get done, class discussions to hold, things to read, and bureaucratic tasks. Even when students are eager to have writing workshop, it is very difficult for a group of people to keep the schedule on track. The size of the group may preclude the process of recognition of a problem much less the solving of it. If the teacher fails to keep to the schedule, the class is not going to be able to solve the problem--they will simply miss out on their time to write. If this becomes a pattern, then relatively little writing gets accomplished--and the class ceases to be a writing class.
Obviously there are times when reality jumps in and disrupts the following of a previously established schedule; we are not advocating mindless adherence to a schedule, come hell or high water. Yet, across two years of teaching the course (six terms), Carolyn's class never missed a scheduled writing workshop time. This happened because Carolyn knew how easily a block of time that is considered to be basically unscheduled (by the teacher) can become scheduled. The overscheduling of writing workshop time, however, would be an overstepping of the teacher's position of authority, cutting into a time in which students' personal authority truly came into prominence.
Thus, Carolyn established a schedule for the 2.5 hours that could easily be maintained:
Poetry
Writing Workshop (35-45 minutes)
Break (5-10 minutes)
Announcements, Bureaucratic Tasks (5-10 minutes)
Collaborative Writing Experiences (45 minutes -1 hour)
Record Keeping, Self Evaluation (last few minutes of class)
By scheduling writing workshop close to the beginning of class, Carolyn could ensure that she could follow through with the promise she made her students --that they would have time to write. By having a schedule that could be written on the chalk board at the beginning of each class period (giving the actual title of the collaborative writing experience as well as information about the nature of the announcements) Carolyn could provide her students with a notion of what was going to happen next in the classroom, which is a source of security for many students. At the same time, this schedule left room for a lot of different types of activities.
In turn, students used their personal authority to make choices about their writing. They chose subject matter and genre. They made choices about the voice of their writing. They chose what to work on--an old or new piece. At any one moment during writing workshop, one student might be using a rhyming dictionary while writing a poem. Another student might be working on a piece of fiction for children. A student might be cutting out shapes to illustrate a counting book, while a couple of students might be discussing a piece of writing or planning a collaboration. A student might be writing in a journal while another student might be staring into space, thinking about what to write. One student might be off to the library to research information that would contribute to a piece of fiction. What all these students had in common is engagement in some part of the writing process. Yet their use of personal authority ensured that they were working on something that was fundamentally interesting to themselves rather than something assigned by the teacher on the basis of positional authority. The scheduling of writing workshop time and the teacher's follow-through with this scheduling provided students with an important opportunity for using personal authority.
Writing Experiences
One of the reasons why Carolyn was placed in the position of authority in this classroom was that she is a writer and she has knowledge about the process of writing. She has studied the writing of others and she has produced her own writing. She knows about the structure of genres and she has solved writing problems through her experiences with editing.
Part of the requirement of Carolyn's positional authority, then, was to provide students with experiences that would expand their choices about their own writing. If Carolyn had abdicated her own positional authority, students would make very limited choices about their writing. This was especially critical since many students limited their conceptions of writing what they had done in college--expository writing of various lengths and under various conditions (e.g., term papers, essays, and essay exams). They would have missed out on poetry, fiction, and the vast possibilities that writing affords.
As a part of Carolyn's positional authority, she planned activities that would provide students with several opportunities for engaging with writing:
•Poetry readings--students were required (positional authority) to bring to class an anthology of poetry that they chose (personal authority). During the required poetry readings, the class would generally choose a subject and student volunteers would read poems that related to that subject (however loosely). Students might choose to read their own poems, as well. Occasionally, the poems that were read would inspire students' writing during the writing workshop; the activation of personal authority in classroom guaranteed students the freedom to respond to their own sources of writing inspiration.
•Conferencing--during her conferencing with students, Carolyn would provide information about writing possibilities from which the student could choose. The type of information would vary with the student's needs--from problem solving information to broad suggestions of topics and genres as a way of getting started.
•Collaborative Writing Experiences--these experiences were classroom activities that were teacher-led but which typically resulted in group writing. Writing in the context of groups meant that students were not required to make the considerable engagement with a particular kind of writing that individual writing requires. In other words, as members of groups, students could try out ballads, patterned language books, songs, stories, and so forth which were the focus of the collaborative writing experiences without having to put a lot of individual effort and struggle into them. Having been made aware of these writing possibilities, they could later choose to engage further with these types of writing on their own during writing workshop.
The positional authority of the teacher led to the existence of the collaborative writing experiences as well as the other writing experiences. Yet, students were not required to make a personal commitment to these forms of writing.
During her portfolio conference at the end of a quarter, one student described her use of personal authority in the context of this kind of activity. She stated that she did not care for the particular kind of writing that was presented during the collaborative writing part of the class one day, but that she decided that it was good to try it anyway. She placed the piece from that day in her portfolio to represent her process of trying new things.
The opportunity to use personal authority in determining her own level of engagement with writing activities was a powerful experience for this particular student--it allowed her to participate willingly in a learning experience that was not as interesting to her as other learning experiences. The activation of students' personal authority in the classroom led to this student making a mature decision of her own accord: she decided to engage with an activity not because she liked it but because she felt that trying new things was a good thing to do. A classroom in which students use personal authority does not require that all activities be "fun" for every student; students do not necessarily need to be "bribed" into writing--that would be an inappropriate use of positional authority by the teacher. Instead, students do need choices, including the choice to dislike some activities.
Intervention
We have noticed throughout our own engagements with the educational system (as well as with many other kinds of systems) that it is very easy for persons in positions of authority to gauge their use of authority in relation to the lowest common denominator. Classroom procedures are often designed to foil the would-be cheater,[1] to control the student whose behavior is out of control in some way, to put to work the students who are lazy for one reason or another; these procedures limit possibilities in the classroom for everyone in response to the problematic behavior of a few students. Through the concept of personal authority, we are advocating turning this situation around--to run classrooms with the assumption that most people have the ability to use personal authority (self-control).
Obviously this does not work for all people, even when classrooms are constructed to be interesting places in which students can make choices about learning. Student-centeredness is not a panacea--students are human beings and can make mistakes in their use of self-control. When a student fails to use personal authority effectively, the teacher needs to scaffold the development of that authority. There are many ways of doing this in the context of writing workshop.
Prevention is key. Class structures such as writing workshop, which allow the teacher to circulate and to have conferences on the run, prevent a lot of problems because the teacher has the opportunity to step in before things get out of hand. Carolyn did this, not so much in a punitive way, but with the assumption that if conversations were getting loud--and appeared to be more social than a basis for writing, for example--then people were having trouble thinking of things to write about. This assumption (which is probably quite true) gave students a way of saving face and it got the message across in terms of reminding students of their obligation to write.
One instance of a social conversation--about good restaurants--became a basis for some collaborative writing. Carolyn overheard the conversation, joined it, and then started a sheet of paper going around the class on which students could put the name of their favorite restaurant and a sentence about why they liked it. This became a classroom publication when Carolyn typed it up and created a layout for it.
Sometimes it is a good idea to let students' use of personal authority fail, that is, to let students make mistakes. Carolyn learned this when a student spent the entire writing workshop one day writing a journal entry filled with complaints about many aspects of being in school. At the end of the journal entry, the student began to reflect on her usage of time. She wrote that she was disappointed in herself for wasting her writing time on complaints and she decided that she would do something different next time. The kind of learning that took place here was far more internalized than the kind of learning that would have happened had Carolyn told her (a use of positional authority) her journal entry was unsatisfactory. This student's learning came as a result of her disappointment with herself; this disappointment with self is an aspect of and is reinforcing to personal authority.
Another good teaching strategy in relation to personal authority is to help students learn how to succeed with whatever starting point they choose. After a discussion of genre in one of Carolyn's classes, Carolyn invited her students to write in any of the genres that had been listed. One student proceeded to make a grocery list (that was one of the genres listed--the class brainstormed genres in every day life as a way of getting a large list going).
Of course, the student in this case complied with the letter of the law--to choose a genre--rather than the spirit of the law--to pick something big enough to really write in. This may have occurred because the assignment was too big for her or perhaps she was testing how far she could go in her use of personal authority. In any case, as Carolyn read the student's grocery list, she realized how different it was from the grocery list she herself would make. That led her to wonder how grocery lists and other everyday impedimentia would represent a character in a piece of fiction. Carolyn responded to the student's writing using this set of ideas and invited the student to explore them in creating a short story. The student took Carolyn up on the invitation and the result was indicative of growth in the student's writing.
Finally, an instance of the misuse of both positional and personal authority in Carolyn's classroom illuminates the good that can come from intervention--even after the fact. During a collaborative writing activity, Carolyn became aware that a group of students were writing in a derogatory manner about another person in the university program in which the class was enrolled. Carolyn struggled with what to do--where the lines of her authority were in relation to the issue of censorship. She did not intervene and then watched with horror as the situation escalated; the initial writing was performed in the classroom and other writers in the class upped the ante with their own additions. One student, who did not share the opinions of the other students, spoke up angrily, protesting the writings, and left the classroom. The situation was clearly out of hand as class ended that day.
That evening Carolyn and Juanita discussed the problem. Juanita analyzed the types of authority in the classroom and the problems with the ways those authorities had been used. With Juanita's analysis, Carolyn began to value the use of personal authority by the student who spoke up and walked out. At Juanita's suggestion, Carolyn's first step was to write a note to this student thanking her for her actions and letting the student know that her message was understood and very much appreciated. Carolyn ensured that the student received this note before the next class session.
Then, Juanita helped Carolyn to identify where she had failed to use her positional authority in the classroom. Language is a very powerful thing. It can help people, but it can also hurt a great deal. In tacitly allowing (through inaction) the students to continue to write a public form of language (language to be performed in some kind of public space), Carolyn had allowed a form of violence to take place in the classroom. This violence was not good for the person who had been discussed in the writing but it was also not good for the class, particularly the writers of the works in question.
The question became how to intervene in what was now a tense situation. As Juanita pointed out to Carolyn, castigating the students for their failure was not a good option because it would put them on the defensive, causing them to reject the overall message of the problem of what happened in the classroom. This rejection would mean that the problem would not have been resolved and the students would not have learned from it. It was likely to happen again. Further, castigating the students for their failures would beg the question of the teacher's failure to use her positional authority. Thus, Juanita suggested that Carolyn apologize to the students for her own failure to use her authority appropriately.
At the beginning of the next class session, Carolyn told her students that she owed them an apology. She explained to the students exactly what was wrong with what she had done. She talked about the ability of language to hurt other people and she explained the difference between private language (such as journals which are read by no one else) and public language. Private language should never be censored, while public language must be used in a thoughtful and nonviolent manner. She explained that the public language used in a classroom was ultimately the responsibility of the teacher. She let them know she was aware of the points at which she could have intervened to prevent the problem and that she was sorry that she had failed the students in her use of authority.
The students' eyes were all on Carolyn as she spoke. There was no feeling of defensiveness in the room because Carolyn was not discussing the shortcomings of the students--she was simply exposing her own shortcomings as a teacher. Instead, after Carolyn's talk about herself was over and she moved the class into writing workshop, the chief culprits called Carolyn over to where they were sitting and they apologized for their behavior. Carolyn's public exposure of her own failings gave students another opportunity for using personal authority--to examine their own behavior, to judge their own behavior, and to make an apology for behavior that was out of line. This use of personal authority on the part of these students was a far more powerful result than anything that could have come about had Carolyn demanded an apology from them (or required them to write a sentence 100 times or any of the other uses of positional authority that are traditional in this kind of situation).
Interventions that use a teacher's position of authority can support the personal authority of students. A teacher's intervention, ideally, should not remove a student's personal authority; rather, it should provide the students an opportunity to reflect on themselves and to make better decisions. To oppose personal authority with positional authority is to recreate the old zero sum game, which we know does not work. Rather, positional authority must scaffold personal authority. Through preventing problems, helping students succeed from their starting points, placing students in a position of learning from their own failures, using assumptions that recognize students' personal authority, and being aware of (as well as exposing to the students) one's own use of positional authority (or one's failure to use it), teachers can create classrooms that reflect student responsibility and leadership.
Assessment
Assessment is a key function of personal authority. It ultimately helps the individual to make plans for his or her own future. It is a way of discerning one's own starting points and is a basis for making goals that help the person move away from the starting point and towards some kind of desirable end.
Because as human beings we cannot see ourselves very well, other people need to be involved in our assessment processes. Particularly during the process of developing personal authority (a process which needs to happen intensively during childhood), we need people with a greater amount of personal authority (adults) to help us take the necessary steps towards self-awareness and self-control. We need to be aware of our behavior and how that affects others, to be aware of our learning process, to be aware of what we know, and to be aware of the possibilities for our learning. This awareness helps us to set goals for ourselves in terms of our actions--what we choose to do with ourselves.
College students are very much attuned to the assessment practices of the university--and the importance of final grades in the class. In order to make the personal authority of the students primary to the assessment process in her classroom, Carolyn helped students use self-assessment effectively and removed as much of the emphasis as possible on the final grade. She accomplished this in several ways:
•Portfolio assessment--one of the main grades in the class was based on the portfolio, which each student assembled at the end of the term. The grade was based on two aspects that students could control no matter what their experience had been with writing--effort and growth. They knew at the beginning of the quarter that these were the criteria.
•Writing process in the class project--students were assigned a project. They were allowed to work on it during writing workshop, they could conference with Carolyn about it, and they were given extensive feedback on their rough drafts. They were given a real audience--each other--for which to write. The final version of the project also received a grade.
•Other grades were related to participation and being present in the class.
•Self-assessment--there was an extensive self-assessment practice established in the class. At the beginning of the school term, students wrote an "Imaginary Portfolio" in which they chose three writing experiences from their own past to consider and wrote about their strengths and the things they felt they needed to work on. Each week students handed in a piece of writing and a self-assessment of that piece. The final self-assessment was included in the portfolio as students wrote a text that was parallel to the "Imaginary Portfolio" but which reflected on the actual pieces in the portfolio.
•Writing feedback--the writing that students handed in on a weekly basis was not graded. Carolyn responded to it as an expert reader and writer, pointing out to the student where she found the writing most engaging, the nature of her engagement with the writing, and inviting the student (when appropriate) to extend the writing.[2]
•Running records--Carolyn recorded information about each piece of writing that she read from each student (in a notebook, one page per student). She noted significant aspects of the piece and the gist of her feedback to the student. She also made notes about conferences she had with the student. In the case of the Imaginary Portfolio, Carolyn recorded each piece the student wrote about, the strengths the student listed, and any goals the student set as well as any other significant piece of information. All of this assessment data guided Carolyn's interventions with students and helped her to identify any patterns that might be significant to a student's writing process.
The institutional requirement that Carolyn grade the students (positional authority) was met by providing students the maximum amount of control (personal authority) over the work that was to be graded and by using process-oriented rather than product-oriented criteria that every student could attain.
By the avoidance of grading the weekly work of the students (a use of positional authority), and through the significant amount of self-assessment used in the classroom, students were guided towards using personal authority in the process of growing as writers. Students set goals for themselves at the beginning of the quarter in the Imaginary Portfolio and they set goals and reflected on their progress towards the goals they had set for themselves in their weekly self assessments. Finally, at the end of the school term, they were able to consider their work over the course of the quarter and to reflect on what they might do in the future, beyond the class that Carolyn taught.
Two Areas of Authority in the Classroom
The model of teacher as the single authority in the classroom makes for a dull place to be at best because there is only one set of ideas in operation (those of the teacher) and because the teacher spends a lot of time controlling (a process which is not intellectually stimulating to students) and less time teaching. At worst, the single authority model leads to chaos when that authority is subverted or complete tyranny when the teacher tries to avoid the subversion of authority. In contrast, a classroom is an intellectually stimulating place to be when the teacher uses positional authority to scaffold the personal authority of the students .
The authority of the teacher by itself (positional authority) is ultimately an inadequate type of authority for running a classroom. As teachers we need to enlist and support the ability of students to develop and use their own personal authority as a way of enhancing both the amount and the quality of learning that takes place. Students' use of personal authority not only creates an interesting and effective classroom, it has the added benefit of helping them to take on the challenges they will have when school is over--to use their personal authority as adults.
[1]Plagiarism is a problem in writing classes. But why do students do this? Some do it because they can; others do it because they are desperate. We suggest that when students have personal authority--choices about what and how they write--and a teacher who uses positional authority wisely in helping students to grow as writers, the incidence of plagiarism decreases.
[2]Carolyn did not write on students' papers (out of respect for students' ownership of their work). Instead, she wrote her comments on sticky notes. Because there were no grades and because these notes were always encouraging, students looked forward to this feedback.
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