Underprivileged tutors teaching underprivileged students: Power, discipline and resistance

Azaola, Marta Cristina (2022) Underprivileged tutors teaching underprivileged students: Power, discipline and resistance. In Underprivileged tutors teaching underprivileged students: Power, discipline and resistance.

Record type: Conference or Workshop Item (Paper)

Abstract

Drawing from the works of Pierre Bourdieu and Michel Foucault, this paper explores the professional trajectories and precarious working conditions of high school teachers and the ways in which their working conditions shape their expectations about discipline in schools and the future aspirations of students. Ethnographic fieldwork was conducted in seven undervalued high schools (four general and three technical) located in three states in Mexico with dissimilar economic and educational outcomes (Tijuana, Mexico City and Tuxtla Gutierrez). Fieldwork comprised 73 semi-structured interviews with students from second and third semesters; 22 semi-structured interviews with tutors and head teachers; 5 focus groups with 32 students in addition to informal observations, conversations and photographs of the schools and their surroundings.
Through an exploration of key concepts such as habitus, field, symbolic violence, power and resistance, the paper explores the control that the institutions exert upon tutors and the control that tutors exert upon students. Through integrating theory with practice, the paper shows how the hidden power imbalances between the intuition, tutors and students create symbolic violence and how tutors and students accept and resist the power of authority in different ways. The paper also explores conceptualisations of the body in the works of Bourdieu and Foucault and shows how both authors help to explain the high expectations regarding students’ personal appearance that fit into predetermined and, often, inferior places in society. Another aspect explored in the paper is the place that emancipation has in the works of Bourdieu and Foucault and discusses whether teaching for emancipation can have a place under the challenging teaching environments found in these institutions.
Findings shed light on three key observations. First, that the tutors’ emphasis on school discipline and students’ neat personal appearance are not only a result of generational clashes amongst tutors and students, but are mainly due to unequal power relations amongst individuals who, although sharing similar working-class backgrounds, experience the arbitrary power of their respective authorities in unequal ways. Second, that tutors’ challenging working conditions and their relative position of authority towards their students help to characterise their daily interactions as both defiant and compliant. Third, that under such teaching environments, tutors contribute to shape students’ future aspirations in reproductive, subordinated but contested ways by students.
The paper concludes with a critical reflection of the possibilities for progressive teaching environments within the works of Bourdieu and Foucault and discusses how such environments would look like in the classrooms of underprivileged schools.

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