Disrupting Authority: The Phenomenality of Antioppressive Education in the Arts

Abstract

The effort to engage in critical pedagogy is often stymied by several factors: institutional or systemic authority acting in opposition to anti-oppressive teaching, a lack of opportunities for students to develop and use personal agency, and the structures within disciplinary discourses and curricula that limit the possibility of social change. Drawing from post-intentional phenomenology (Vagle, 2014) and narrative inquiry (Clandinin & Connelly, 2000), this study attempts to reconcile structural and agentic approaches. By placing the poststructural philosophy of Deleuze & Guattari (1987) in dialog with critical (Freire, 1970/2000; Kumashiro, 2015) and post-critical pedagogies (Lather, 1995), I have been able to explore my lived-experience of authority as that which defers or denies student authorship. I have further explored a Deweyan approach to expression as I endeavored to live out the promise of using disruptiveness as a pedagogical tool for instigating student authorship. The resultant text is an assemblage that explores the complex, partial, shifting, multiple, tentative, and sometimes contradictory manifestations of authority and authorship. Through the selective use of voice, typeface, color, and illustration, this layered multivocality creates a palimpsest (Dillon, 2007) that progressively narrows, not to certainty, but to the present moment. Results of this study do not support causality or claim to raise test scores and close achievement gaps. Instead, this work underscores the importance of teachers’ critical reflections on their practice and the long-term benefits for students and society that such reflexivity allows. Teachers and teacher candidates who are able to examine their own education and to understand the relationship between student authorship and the manner in which authority is taken up will be primed to create pedagogical spaces in which students are not merely the recipients of knowledge but the authors of their own phenomenality. In this way, teachers who allow their authority to be disruptive and disrupted acknowledge students as the complex fully-realized beings they are and erase the false distinction between being-schooled and being-in-the-world.