What determines the difference between success and failure in building relationships with students? In the study “Working the Crevices: Granting Students Authority in Authoritarian Schools,” Joan F. Goodman explores the dynamics of giving more freedom to students as a means of confronting student alienation. Published in the May 2011 issue of the American Journal of Education, the study details the cases of four second-year Teach for America graduate students who teach in urban public schools with strict authoritarian hierarchies. These teachers each describe an experience in granting freedom to students as a means of achieving cooperation.
Goodman examines the “alienation gap” that exists between students and teachers, expressed through students flouting school rules to resisting assigned work to quitting school altogether. The gap that it creates, Goodman suggests, even precedes the achievement gap.
But if students are allowed to raise their own concerns to teachers, and if teachers contribute by taking their concerns seriously, the gap can slowly begin to close. As a result, this can lead to increased attendance, improved academic performance, a stronger school community and a more positive education experience overall for students and faculty alike.
However, methods of achieving student agency differ, and success varies. Goodman discusses the difference between granting power and granting authority in increasing student freedom — while granting power is merely a permitted extension of control from teacher to student, grant authority implies a mutual consent between the changed dynamic between teacher and student. A student who has been granted power not only has control, but also decides what having control means, and sets his or her own definitions for exercising it.
Through four very different anecdotes, Goodman exposes varying strategies in enhancing student cooperation. She identifies a few common themes — for example, that reaching out to individual influential students is often more effective than reaching out to a group, and that students are more responsive to grants of authority than mere grants of power.
While it is limited by the specific nature of its cases, Goodman’s study provides interesting examples whose themes introduce new approaches to improving student-teacher relationships.
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