Learning from rural Mexican schools about commitment and work

During the last 3 years we have made many visits to two rural Mexican primary schools. As a result of our experiences there, we believe that students' sense of responsibility in a school setting depends on the nature of the commitments they make and the work they do in and for the school. We have also learned that certain educational and social concepts expressed in Spanish can enrich our thinking about the social curriculum that teachers and students create in classrooms. In this article we explore the idea of students' "social work" by explaining what we are learning in these Mexican schools and providing examples .from selected writings about life in U.S. classrooms.

Metaphors and the Social Curriculum

THE WAY WE THINK AS HUMANS is shaped by the metaphors we use to express our thoughts. A metaphor (from the Greek metaphora, to transfer or carry over) allows us to understand one thing in terms of something else. We can represent the new in terms of what is familiar (e.g., the Internet as a "web"), the complex in simpler terms (e.g., learning as "information processing"), or the abstract in terms of the concrete (e.g., life as a "stream").

Management

Management, borrowed from the language of factories and businesses, is a metaphorical word to represent what teachers and students do. Manage derives from the Italian mano, meaning "hand." The purpose of managing is to "put our hand on it," to organize and control. This promotes efficiency in our teaching and helps gain student obedience when necessary. As a manager, the teacher defines what is appropriate and inappropriate, and what constitutes a problem.

There are many reasons for the emphasis on classroom management. Preservice and beginning teachers consistently ask for more information and practice related to this topic, and the great diversity of students in U.S. classrooms offers serious challenges to every teacher. Management is inherent in academic tasks controlled directly by the teacher. This is reflected in the language of instruction; for example, pedagogical terms such as on-task signify a teacher-controlled environment. Classroom activities such as lecture, recitation, and closely monitored individual seatwork exemplify management. At its best, the metaphor of management offers positive techniques for teachers to bring order to classroom and school life. And teachers do need to control certain classroom matters, for example, how paperwork and assignments are handled, or the consequences for truly disruptive actions by students. What concerns us about this notion of classrooms is the limited worth of "management" as a way to describe the social interactions and social work of teachers and students in classrooms. Management is but one of the metaphors we can use to describe social interactions in classrooms and schools. Another useful metaphor is "guidance."

Guidance

To "guide" (from the old English witan, to look after or to know) is to offer our knowledge to others through modeling, explanation, and wise counsel. Guidance can be implicit (such as an adult modeling a way of talking to each other in classrooms), or quite direct (for example, giving students freedom to engage in certain tasks and then discussing what we might learn socially and academically from the experience). Classroom activities such as demonstrations, debriefing after small group work, and presenting student projects can be symbolized through a metaphor of guidance.

A recent article that reflects the metaphor of guidance (Richardson & Fallona, 2001) noted the frequent disconnection of instruction and traits of character in writing about classroom management. Traits of character refer to "who a teacher is, what a teacher believes, and how these beliefs are manifest in the teacher's conduct" (p. 707). The authors argued for "explicit instruction in virtuous conduct" (a management stance) and "virtuous traits of character" (guidance through modeling). It strikes us that even in writings where there is an articulate focus on character and guidance (as in this article), there is not a conception of what students can do to enact virtuous conduct, or at least a recognition that the nature of the work we do affects our character, the form of social control in classrooms, and the kind of social curriculum we enact.

The social curriculum

Management and guidance, then, are two metaphors we can use to think about classroom life. Such metaphors fit within the larger idea of a social curriculum that explicitly and implicitly influences our actions in educational settings (Charney, 1997; Powell, McLaughlin, Savage, & Zehm, 2001). The explicit social curriculum "is comprised of the knowledge, skills, beliefs, emotions, and attitudes which are deemed necessary for people to work productively and live harmoniously together in the classroom" (Powell et al., 2001, p. 23). The enacted social curriculum is carried out through the work that we do in school, as individuals who are part of a group.