Steve Wright

I’m a teacher. It’s a strange word, “teacher”. I fight its gravity every day. I’m a teacher, which describes my job but it’s also an identity of sorts, part of my intersectionality. I tell people I meet, the cashier at the hardware store, the woman in the adjacent campground, the person in line with me or in the elevator. I tell people, “I’m a teacher”. I think I’m looking for a shortcut to trust. Everyone has a personal relationship with ‘teacher’, both as an ideal, and as dozens of very specific humans from our past. I tell people, “I’m a teacher” and it always feels a little bit like I’m bragging, like I’m claiming membership to an exclusive club. Teacher is one of those onion concepts, layers of meaning, layers of understandings.

I fall squarely and unapologetically on the side of agency which defines the choices I make about how I use my power in the classroom. A teacher has positional power given to them by the institution and by society. An argument I will try to make is that exercising positional power reduces student agency to the detriment of learning and growth. The classroom that I teach in is not mine nor are the students mine nor is the experience owned by me. This doesn’t excuse me from accountability for the quality of these things, it’s just a recognition that exercising power or claiming power through false ownership is counter-productive.

I reject teacher as sage or source of facts. I reject student as obedient, empty vessel and the increasingly popular, student as employee in training. Education, as I understand it, is a process where students learn to recognize and use their power to positively impact their lives. The content of education, the curriculum – Math, English Computer Science – is the context of learning. Acquiring content is not not the goal nor the purpose of Education. In my infrequently humble opinion, growth and personal agency is the purpose of Education. If a young person can grow to be independent then, and only then, can they choose to be interdependent. Without agency, interdependence is dependence if not oppression.