Educative Authority in the Classroom PDF

# L'autorité éducative de l'enseignant ## De quelle autorité parle-t-on? - Today, when the media, politicians and public opinion employ the term "authority", they are primarily referring to an authoritarian conception of authority. According to this conception, a teacher, for example, holding a...

# L'autorité éducative de l'enseignant ## De quelle autorité parle-t-on? - Today, when the media, politicians and public opinion employ the term "authority", they are primarily referring to an authoritarian conception of authority. According to this conception, a teacher, for example, holding a statutory function, would exercise domination over the student in order to obtain unconditional obedience from him, in the form of submission. This desire for domination would be imposed unilaterally, without discussion or explanation, in a power relationship and not in a relationship. - Another important movement in society tends, on the other hand, to refuse the idea of authority and its very exercise, in the name of an ideology or a philosophical posture. In the teaching and learning relationship for example, it sometimes happens that the teacher relativizes his position as a transmitter of knowledge or even considers that exercising authority is not part of his mission. This position reflects a conception of evacuation of authority. - We also note a social representation that is established, according to which there would be a "natural" authority. Some would possess this gift, others would not. This representation is very present in the professions of education and teaching: the "good" teacher would be endowed with a "natural" authority that would impose itself on its own in a process of seduction ("charisma"), simply because he holds the knowledge, without the need for him to prove it, to persuade or argue. ## To exercise an educative authority, it would be necessary to be able to free oneself - From the representations and ways of acting derived from authoritarian, evacuated or natural authority, - And to recognize that authority is a fact, consubstantial with the human bond, a regulating principle of the social bond. It therefore cannot fail to be exercised. It is based on a responsibility that is not delegated (personal dimension). It does not exist in itself, but in relation to others (relational dimension). ## Questioning oneself to free oneself from the representations - And ways of acting derived from authoritarian, evacuated, natural authority: - Working on the relationships I have with knowledge, with my teaching discipline; - Working on my relationship to the norm and to conflict; - Working to occupy his place generationally (adult with an educational role) and to inhabit his institutional function (teacher transmitting knowledge). - Educative authority would be expressed in three dimensions: being the authority, having authority and making authority. - Being the authority: this is the statutory authority. ## The status is a necessary but not sufficient condition - For the exercise of authority. It raises two non-negotiables: that of my institutional function (teacher transmitting knowledge), that of my place generationally (adult older than the child, depository of a culture to transmit, guarantor of the respect of anthropological founders of all social life: incest taboo, murder, parasitism). ## Having authority: This is the authority of the author. - Sufficient confidence in oneself is necessary to authorize oneself to access responsibility, to autonomy over one's own life in one's relationships with others, and to authorize the other to be author of himself, on the path to autonomy and responsibility. ## Exercising authority: - Fundamentally, authority stems from knowledge of action. ## The teacher mobilizes in his practice - Knowledge of action always contextualized. - The exercise of this knowledge of action rests on pedagogical devices (educational framework containing, mediation between oneself and the pupils, didactic contributions) as much as on communication vectors (involving the body, looks, voice, gestures, position in space, movements and distance...). - Ultimately, educative authority is, according to Bruno Robbes, a statistically asymmetrical relationship in which the author, possessing knowledge that he puts into action in a specific context, manifests the will to influence the other recognized as a subject, in order to obtain from him and without resorting to violence a recognition that makes this influence allows him to be in turn author of himself. ## If natural authority is a myth - Evacuated authority an ideological posture, authoritarian authority an attempt to restore nostalgic power, educative authority, as for it, works towards its own disappearance, because its ultimate purpose lies in the emergence of the educated subject as author of himself. ## The three characteristics of educative authority: - Asymmetry and symmetry; - Influence of the holder of statutory authority; - Recognition of the legitimacy of the holder of statutory authority by the one on whom it is exercised. Key element of the legitimization process of educative authority, recognition goes through the identification of skills and knowledge in action. # Les lois de la classe - The laws of the class are the laws imposed on the school by society. They are also called "anthropological laws". These are the incest taboo, the murder taboo and the parasitism taboo. These laws are not negotiable. It is not possible to negotiate them: they cannot be questioned either by the pupil or by the teacher. However, it is essential to explain them, to give a real legibility for all within the educational community. - Translated explicitly and displayed in the classroom, the laws of the class found the place (classroom), set the limits, allow the emergence of language (concept of the 4Is of institutional pedagogy: places, limits, law, shared language). Here are some possible formulations: ## The incest taboo - (impossibility of a privileged or private relationship between the child and the adult, distinction of spaces - public/private, non-confusion of places guaranteeing the existence of each subject as a singular being) imposes a distance affection between the teacher and the student: - "Here the teacher does not belong to anyone, but works with everyone"; - "Here, we are not here to love each other, nor to hate each other"; - "Here, I am not the teacher of any particular pupil, but that of all the pupils". ## The murder taboo - (or violence ban, obligation to verbalization, passage through speech) guarantees the physical and psychological safety of everyone. - "Here, we exchange, but not just any way. We are among human beings and we are here to live together"; - "Here, everyone has the right to be quiet in their body, in their heart, in their affairs". ## The parasitism taboo - (necessity of the social utility of each member of a society, that everyone has a recognized place and participates in its development, hence an obligation to work) joins the definition of the school place in its foundations, and that of distinct statuses of the teacher, students and other members of the educational community. - "Here, it is a classroom, everyone is here to learn"; - "Here, it is a classroom, the teacher teaches, the student learns"; - "Here, I am in a classroom, I work". # Du respect... à l'autorité de l'enseignant - Unlike the term authority, respect seems to be stripped of its negative meaning, since in everyday language, individuals bring it forward to demand unconditional duties from others towards them. Piaget (1998) distinguished "unilateral respect" and "mutual respect" (p. 28). Our research has revealed a third meaning of respect, which has implications for the construction of the authority relationship: respect initiated by the teacher. ## Unilateral respect - It is defined as respect for the adult's person by the pupils, beyond his professional status. Thus, for example, the teacher may demand that the pupils greet him even outside the establishment. In class, the pupil must remove his coat, the teacher refuses certain outfits... Other requirements concern the teaching function: listening to the professor's word, use of oral and written language forms admitted in the school universe. However, this representation of respect that the teacher "imposes" does not overexpose the person to the risk of rigidity, authoritarianism, violence, leading the teacher to experience the difficulties he encounters as a lack of consideration due to his person? ## Respect initiated by the teacher - Teachers who see respect as a set of behaviors that they first need to impose on themselves before demanding it of their students establish a relationship that allows more room for symmetry, and therefore more recognition of their authority by the students. Summarized by the principle "I apply to myself what I demand of others" (Ricœur, 1990, 1993; Seux, 2003), respect initiated by the teacher is an imperative of his credibility as a professional: "If you don't show your demandingness, if you don't show a certain degree of seriousness and respect for the pupils - the fact of arriving on time, the fact of being present -, I think that already, that's the basis. For my part, a teacher who is not punctual and who is not present, he loses a lot of credit, so that's something that I find absolutely imperative. I do everything to be present" (a college teacher). Such respect has a value of "example" and "identification", which encourages students to reciprocate. Finally, and perhaps most importantly, respect initiated by the teacher shows the consideration he has for his students. - The pupil's respect for the teacher will only develop if the adult, in a first intention, takes the first step before expecting it of the other. It comes from a "primordial" ethical posture of the adult: it is his generational position which, because it gives him a de facto precedence over the child or adolescent, obliges him to take the initiative of transmitting respect without prior condition. Thus, respect initiated by the teacher founds an authority that goes beyond the statutory position. Because it opens to mutual respect, it truly initiates the recognition of teaching authority by pupils: "so for them a professor who respects, who has a healthy authority, well we have to respect him, so it's normal that he has the authority since he is just and right, so the authority is normal for them" (a college teacher). # Autorité et savoir ## Authoritarian authority and knowledge - Many are those who consider that the teacher's authority is based solely and a priori on the knowledge he possesses (Lombard, 2003). Today, however, the teacher can no longer define himself exclusively as the holder of knowledge, and this for at least two reasons. First, contrary to the belief that presents itself as an unquestionable truth, the scientific truth of knowledge is always relative. What is taught at school is a selection of knowledge produced over the centuries up to today, according to scientific methodologies (another distinction from belief), as it stands today. Secondly, the transmission of knowledge is no longer the exclusive prerogative of the school: the exponential development of new information and communication technologies allows most students to access much more diverse and verifiable knowledge than the teacher's knowledge. It is therefore on these two counts that the authority of transmitted knowledge is undermined. So if the teacher can no longer base his authority solely on the knowledge he holds, what can he base it on today? - The teacher must allow his pupils to distinguish the truth of knowledge (specified by the conditions of its production), from opinion, conviction or belief. He is the one who creates the effective conditions - didactic and pedagogical - that allow the student to be engaged in the activity of learning and no longer submitted to a knowledge that would have authority, simply because of the teacher who holds statutory authority states it. We find here pedagogy and the principle of educability carried by the teacher, striving to allow students that his knowledge is accessible to them. The student's reflexivity on the knowledge he receives then becomes a major challenge, not only to legitimize the teacher's authority, but above all to allow the student to access a relationship with knowledge that is both critical and emancipatory. To do this, the teacher has experimental methodology, documentary research and creative methodology (Meirieu, 2005, 2008). - The relationship between authority and knowledge can also be examined from the point of view of the teacher's domination, obedience, even submission of the student. Bernard Rey (2004) writes that "the teacher's authority [...] cannot be exercised to make pupils accept the affirmations inherent in a knowledge. [It] should not lead him to use the argument of authority to impose knowledge”. The student's access to genuine knowledge can only go through "proofs drawn from experience and reason" of the student himself (p. 116), certainly not by a teacher who would want the student to submit to his person (p. 116). - Alain Marchive (2005) goes even further, when he indicates that exclusive submission to the master, as long as it translates into certain conformist attitudes of students facing the school task, can generate difficulties of learning and appropriation of knowledge. # Autorité évacuée et savoir ## If the statutory position of transmitters of knowledge of teachers is not - A guarantee of effective authority, it does not mean that they come to doubt the validity of their legitimacy to occupy in the long term a position of authority to instruct and educate. Many teachers are still uncomfortable with the mention of authority, which would explain the fact that they do not want or do not manage to hold their place as figures of authority (Herfray, 2005), guarantors of the law and supports of identification. Is the idea of assigning police officers within the school system itself not the symptom of the refusal of many teaching professionals to assume the implementation of the law, in its dual educational and limiting dimension? This is one of the major challenges facing our professions. # Qu'est-ce qu'un "bon professeur"? - Pupils readily use the generic term of respect from the teacher towards them. It is this respect that legitimizes his influence in their eyes. Research presenting the constituents of an educational authority such as pupils recognize it in their teachers allows us to be more precise. - Denis Meuret (2004) concludes from a study conducted between 1990 and 1994 with French junior high school students that "effective teachers get pupils to listen and work in the name of their competence and in the name of their concern to make them all succeed, to accompany them in their learning. They treat them as people" (p. 19). - In March 2004, a survey conducted by the Okapi magazine, No. 755, had shown results going in this direction: 97% of junior high school students said that teachers want their students to succeed and 90% that they know how to interest them. For 83% of them, authority is a quality for a teacher. They were finally 43% to blame teachers for not listening to them and 38% to ensure that certain teachers do not respect them. - Yvan Darrault-Harris (2003) takes up for his part the elements of definition of the "good teacher" (the one who has authority) that appear in a survey conducted by Éric Debarbieux among high school students: this teacher is someone who respects them, whose mood is stable, whose evaluation criteria are clear and permanent, who is competent and passionate about his discipline. Darrault-Harris concludes on the importance of respect as an element of symmetrization of the relationship: "the respect shown by the teacher results in his qualification as 'good prof'" (p. 55). Being moreover inscribed in his legal obligations, the author underlines that "respect characterizes the moral attitude [...] to which the teacher must, without fail, adhere” (p. 55). Just as Meuret underlined that “effective teachers [...] are anything but 'authoritarian'" (p. 19), Darrault-Harris affirms that “the pedagogical authority relationship [...] is indeed, in the eyes of high school pupils, the result of an initial and continuous evaluation of the teacher's attitude towards individual pupils and also the group" (p. 56). # L'autorité de l'enseignant et les logiques des relations enseignants/parents - According to teachers, parents seem to have a major influence on the exercise of their authority. Four distinct logics of teacher-parent relations appear. ## Logic of mimetic disqualification - In their discourse, teachers say that there would be a deficit of authority on the part of parents, even before children enter kindergarten, which would explain the difficulties of certain pupils in accepting their authority. First, many parents would not impose enough "constraint(s)", limits. They entrust teachers with their inability. Secondly, an inversion of generational places is observed in verbal exchanges and the ability to be obeyed by parents, who lose control of the relationship and the decision: "Some children speak to their parents... It's shocking and the parents don't say anything"; "Parents are no longer listened to, they are no longer obeyed; it's the children who decide" (a kindergarten teacher). Teachers then develop a discourse of disqualification of parents, positioning themselves as teachers or substitutes. This discourse serves as an explanation for the difficulties that teachers experience with their pupils: it is the lack of parental authority that complicates the exercise of teaching authority: "If we have parents who do not assume their role, we have more difficulties with their children" (a kindergarten teacher). - But the disqualification also plays in the other direction. It sometimes happens that a parent, through discourse or attitudes, reaches either the authority, or the teacher, or both, even in the classroom: "If the children see that the parents do not respect the teacher or allow themselves to speak to him in a certain way, the teacher’s authority is questioned, in fact, with regard to the children" (a kindergarten teacher). Parental speech then founds the representation that the pupil has of the teaching statutory authority. It has authority over the pupil, against the teacher. This logic of disqualification can go as far as defiance, activating a double generational and institutional disqualification of the teacher: "It made me feel strange to hear a teacher being scolded by a dad. We feel diminished in our role"; "It feels strange to hear a student say: “the dad, he scolded you”. It's like a child being scolded by his parents or a student being scolded by his teacher" (a kindergarten teacher). The parental word is all the more disqualifying when it is uttered in the presence of the teacher, in front of other parents and/or the children. ## Logic of dependence - Teachers consider that authority depends on parents. This logic is expressed in two ways. First, teaching authority depends on authority exercised by parents, in the sense that authority in the child - as an asymmetrical relationship founded on obedience, respect and listening to adults - is acquired first in the family space. Secondly, it is through attitudes but above all through "discourse" that parents hold about teachers, that teaching authority is or is not legitimized. The teacher should, in a way, first exert authority over parents before being able to exercise it in front of students. This word from parents is as necessary as it is risky. - What do these discourses contain? Teaching authority accepted by the pupil first depends on the representation that parents have of the teaching function. Through the words of parents about the teacher spoken in the classroom, it is both the teacher and the class who are (de)legitimized. Thus, for example, the transmission of knowledge can be relegated to the background in favor of a focus on signs of order. The misunderstanding lies in this discrepancy in representation about what the teaching function is. The teacher claims respect, all the more strongly as he feels challenged professionally and personally. His legitimacy to set limits in the classroom is questioned. - The representation that parents have of the teaching function is also fueled by a social representation, which accepts more readily that a man exercises authority than a woman. In a very feminized profession, this representation is integrated by male teachers as a distinguishing mark of recognition on the part of families (especially fathers), illegitimately undermining their female colleagues. The dissemination of this representation is problematic, in terms of transmitting the values of secularism carried by the school (religious neutrality, equality of the sexes). - Finally, the seniority and reputation of the teacher in an establishment increase the teacher's credit in the eyes of parents. Faced with these parental representations on which their authority depends, teachers try to control their image as best they can. ## Logic of independence - Teachers sometimes pose their authority according to a logic that we qualify as independence vis-à-vis parents. Contained in the phrase "I prefer to solve the problems myself" (an elementary school teacher), this logic consists of not soliciting parents for every occasion. Some principles are implemented, such as with the management of punishments. The first principle favors immediate treatment: punishment must be done "right away". The second principle is that of the distinction of places: on the one hand the professional space of the school, on the other the private space of the home: "Punishments [do] not go to the house" (an elementary school teacher). Linked to the second, the third principle relies on the distinction of teacher/parent roles: it is the principle of discretion of information that the teacher transmits to parents about punishments. ## The authority that pupils recognize in the teacher - Is derived from this logic of independence. The teacher delimits the space on which his action bears on pupils, creating with them a true relationship of trust that perpetuates his authority. It is therefore by placing parents in a place not confused with his own that the teacher authorizes them to be part of a logic of complementarity. In this sense, the logic of independence in the teacher-parent relationship precedes the logic of complementarity. ## Logic of complementarity - The remarks characterizing the logic of disqualification are nuanced. Some teachers believe that parents know how to transmit to their children the meaning they attach to school, a place of work and transmission of knowledge. Because it remains the majority, the parental discourse of respect for the teacher would allow the pupil to integrate an image of teaching authority. If the logic of dependence is at work, it plays here a beneficial role for teaching statutory authority, as it legitimizes it through a sort of a priori credit. We are then talking about a shift towards a logic of complementarity. - The logic of complementarity is also observed when authority is exercised independently by parents and by teachers. Paradoxically, it is because there is a certain independence of parental authority and that of teachers that the child builds his relationship to authority, relying on this complementarity between family and school education. It results in a mutual benefit. - But for this logic to be efficient, parents and teachers must pursue common goals: functions of protection and security of authority, "need for benchmarks”. It is legitimate for teachers to take up these functions in their professional framework of intervention (in a logic of continuum, co-education, complementarity) by setting prohibitions, limits, benchmarks that are not arbitrary for pupils. Thus, beyond teaching or parental status, it is the child's relationship to the limit of adults, a relationship to the asymmetry of generational places and to transmission that is worked on. # Exercer une autorité éducative au quotidien - “They try together to increase their power over things, to enlarge the domain of their freedom." - F. Oury and A. Vasquez, 1971, p. 159. - Whatever the variety of the ANALYSIS MODALITIES OF SITUATIONS that we will describe in this last chapter, it is always in relation to our functional definition of authority (a pupil — or a parent — accepts or refuses to obey a legitimate request from a teacher, expressed a priori without violence) that we determine the proposed situations for study. In any profession, the analysis of situations is an essential constituent of the construction of professionalism. In a pedagogical situation, we know that the experienced teacher takes information on pupils, processes it and regulates his action according to these complex treatments, but never in an automated way as situations are always unique and pupils are always different.¹ It is precisely these reflective capacities and this ability to implement alternative knowledge of action in case of difficulty that are lacking in other teachers. They can access them through the study of diverse situations between peers, sharing analyses and possible responses, according to methodologies such as those proposed here. Trainings of this type followed at several points in professional life, speed up the awarenesses and increase the range of available actions, certainly guarantees of expertise. ## The "game of cards" - This technique was developed by the Academic Center for Assistance to Schools and Establishments (CAAEE) specifically for the training of young teachers of secondary schools.