How a class looks like is a power issue
Let me tell you a story...
When I arrived last September to my new school in Hamburg I found the classroom in which I had to teach to be ugly and very impersonal, even dirty. Students were still sitting in rows and there was absolutely no decoration at all. The room itself was not that ugly, it is an old building but has charme, but the classroom was lacking of thoughts about aesthetics and handle with a lot of negligence.
I of course started form the first week to speak together with the kids about democratic aspects of our environment or about how our environment influencies our learnings and our access to resources. Yes, we talked about furniture, light access, where is the door, a bit of feng-sui and a lot of constitutional aspects of the learning itself.
One day the principal entered the room and said,
"well having a teacher who is an expert in democratic classroom environments, (supposed to be myself!) I cannot see here any improvements"In deed they were not any improvements to be seen. She was right. Everything was as it was before me.
Improvements were inside our minds. We have talked (kids and me) about issues, but when a decision had to be made, they were giving arguments not to change anything, so they have decided not to change anything, and I respected this, of course and did not change anything.
Democracy needs time and intrinsic motivation. So we did nothing.
We were not convinced enough.
After a couple of weeks some of the kids wanted to change some things and they convinced two or three more, they did change their own environments, but I still did not press the rest of the group to change anything. Some others were saying that it was stupid to have some people sitting in rows and others in groups, but it was not my aim to have a perfect solution from the very beginning but to see a process in which kids were working on their own competences for democracy without being aware of it. Instead of arranging everything in a "perfect" way, I introduce the issue of minorities and how important they are for a quality democracy. Our minorities were sitting not anymore in rows, but in small teams, because they considered this could help them to learn better. The majority still wanted to remain in rows and they did. I showed respect as a teacher for both paces.
I was really proud of the kids, of all of them, of each of them.
In the meanwhile we read about democracy, we learnt some articles of the German Constitution, we even had fun learning them by heart ;) , we played a role play, a frozen poses session and we had some debates about furniture again and again. Some of the kids were very happy, for others were too slow, we changed the furniture approximately once a week and experimented.
Things happened in the following weeks. Debates have been taking place, kids talking with other teachers and parents about how democratic our classroom were and if it was at all (parents and other teachers told to me that they were thinking about our classroom)
Well, after some time they decided by themselves to change arrangements and two of them with the agreement of all the class decided to do a project (we have once in a year a week devoted to a personal project for students, no classes, only the own project) having as aim:
"to create a better environment for all of us"I was exultant of joy!
I could have chosen to change everything the first day, when I was shocked by the undemocratic elements I saw... or just wait and accompany the process of the students in getting to identify which elements were there to be progressively changed. I decided myself for the second option. This is why I mean, there is always power in each of our actions in the classroom, in each of our decisions there is power inside. Teachers who are aware of this and believe that sharing power is a gain for the learning community are the teachers who are a part of a whole picture.
