Understanding Approaches to Authority
“It appears to me that some of you have transformed your English lessons into a day-care nursery… If this continues, I will take matters into my own hands… We are often solicited for references concerning our opinion of you… So, help yourselves out!”.
A rather standard, group email from their faculty’s director, according to some of my graduate students as the subject came up in our English class. Yet some of them felt aggrieved: “I’m fed up with this, we’re adults!”. My thoughts exactly. But it was not the first time I had seen such an approach to managing students’ behaviour. I had not really been trained to deal with classroom management much in my CELTA education, and according to literature reviews, neither have many teachers in higher education. As part of my MA in Education, Teaching & Learning at the University of Sheffield, and as a young English teacher from the UK, I wanted to understand these teacher-student interactions in a French graduate school, and began to question different approaches to authority as well as my own.
Macleod, MacAllister and Pirrie led me learning about Wrong’s five forms of authority: coercive, legitimate, competent, personal and authority by inducement. With obvious overlaps between the forms, I analysed what I observe in my day-to-day environment, starting with the one that caught my attention (and intrigued/scared me the most): coercive authority. This is considered to be a student’s belief, so that if “a teacher might humiliate them in front of the whole school then it does not matter that the teacher would never do such a thing”. I had already come across accounts of humiliation in French schools through Merle’s research, in which he cites making students pick work out of the bin, or answering questions publicly on the whiteboard, drawing comparisons with a gladiatorial arena where the pupil undergoes a symbolic killing of their student status in front of their peers. This echoed statements I had heard from my students. Was this normal practice in France? Had I been oblivious to this in my own education or teaching? I found out that cultural differences might have a role to play.
The Culture Map is a tool created by Erin Meyer, which draws on Geert Hofstede’s cultural research and applies it to a business environment. Measuring factors such as approaches to leading, communication and evaluation, the Culture Map plots countries on a scale. France, for example, finds itself closer to the hierarchical end of the leading scale than the UK, implying a distance between the subordinate and the boss for the former, and a more egalitarian approach for the latter. In terms of communication and feedback, the French typically have a more implicit communication style with direct negative feedback, whereas the British are more explicit, but are more indirect in this instance.
My own experience in the UK has clearly shaped my approach to teaching and my own communication style; maybe not as hierarchical as my French counterparts and more cautious with the directness of the language I use when talking to students, so as not to alienate them. I feel like I fall into the personal authority category, which McLaughlin writes about through reflection of his early days of teaching: “my authority as a teacher was predicated on how I related personally to students — their caring for me”. Striking a balance between such differences in authority can be hard. I can understand why some teachers want to create distance to fulfil their authoritative expectations and impose a sense of hierarchy, however vulnerability, affectivity and care are not are teacher’s enemy. bell hooks and Freire’s work on pedagogy remind me that authenticity, vulnerability and caring are all essential qualities in a teacher’s role, but a critical eye is also beneficial to understand where the lines can be drawn and redrawn throughout a teacher’s career and cultural environment.
Matthew Stroud is an MA Education, Teaching and Learning student at the School of Education, University of Sheffield
