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Establishing A Place Within SchoolsThe relationships that teachers had with their schools and the position of the video programs are in many ways defined by how the programs came into existence because these set the stage for how the relationships would develop. Boarding High had a program that involved the most people but in some respects it has the simplest story. It was the product of a number of people simultaneously initiating activity at different locations. One man, who did not participate in courses at Boarding High, used his internship to run a short digital program in a different high school school. Meanwhile, the art teacher had been developing what she viewed as a program in fine arts and made contact with a Native artist, who was involved with the funding agency in bringing art to children on reservations. All of these various moves and the connections made between people at all three organizations resulted in the digital art program arriving at Boarding High. The college interns, who were the actual teachers of the program, consequently had a certain degree of alienation (low solidarity and low power) from the school and from the process that got them there because they had ties to none of the organizations prior to being recruited for the Boarding program. This alienation was demonstrated by a number of problems that occurred: The first course was never completed due to conflicts between the school’s schedule and the interns’ availability. During the second course, all the responsibility for managing activities were thrust upon one intern without any clarity about his position. And in the third course, the interns had no time to prepare—they did not know how to use iMovie—being told about the plan at the last minute. In each course, there was an ambiguity about who had the authority to lead activities, and only the interns and the art teacher developed a degree of solidarity. They were, however, highly constrained by time. The events of the second course particularly demonstrate the position of interns. The interns first had to struggle to create a schedule, which in the end had only two of the three interns there at a time because the arrangements had been made without consulting them, but the intern who found himself unexpectedly in charge also had to arrange for the equipment and did not have the authority to assure its availability. He expressed frustration and embarrassment to me about the position he was in. In effect, he had all the power and responsibility for structuring the second course but was never told so, and he lacked sufficient power at the digital arts agency to obtain equipment for every meeting. The interns were able to overcome the lack of power and solidarity within the classroom overtime: All three interns also conducted another arts program in the art teacher’s classes and became increasingly comfortable with the setting, so that they took it upon themselves to have an after-school presentation of both programs’ projects. The third course (in the fall of 2002) involved a new set of interns and under the authority of a new director of the digital art organization. These interns were supervised by a graduate student intern, thus some confusion was removed, but all who had been involved in planning the program at that school were absent except for the art teacher. In each course, the interns and other visitors (when present), stopped at the office on the way in to register and get name tags. This established interns as outsiders with relatively little power. The first set of interns, who were present for the first two courses, remained in the classroom or in the area outside the classroom throughout; their connection was with the art teacher and room. The second set of interns, however, accompanied students during recording and therefore went a number of places throughout the campus. Thus the first set of interns formed solidarity with the art teacher, and the second set formed less solidarity but directly with students. The art teacher, who described herself as one-eighth Native American but mostly Spanish, seemed unlike most of the staff I met. She had little interaction with anyone else from the school in my presence, but she—in a style I associate with artists—elaborately described her students as excited by the project, despite the difficulty interns had in maintaining their attention. She apparently had positive relations with everyone—continually expressing solidarity (though also some distress when half the school was sent home)—but in her classroom, she had all of the authority. Suburban High was in most ways a dramatically different program because it was designed, led, and controlled by one man, but in this it resembled the art teacher’s dominion over her class. The Suburban teacher had been retiring from a local news station when the principal from another school offered him the opportunity to teach a “couple classes,” but when a friend offered to have him teach four classes at the school where one son was enrolled and another would be enrolled by the time I observed, he accepted the second offer. He was in the process of completing the necessary steps to become fully accredited as a teacher while I was at the school, but he had an expertise and thus authority over the subject matter. His program was designed specifically around his previous career and his experience in running lights and audio for the children's theater that used the school’s auditorium. His relationship with the school was as both teacher and parent. And he had an expertise that made him valuable in both roles. He had a strong relationship with the principal, producing video projects for her with student help. (Defending this activity to a complaining student, he claimed that this was the way to get the things they wanted.) The teacher showed high solidarity with other teachers in the performing arts department, but tensions were evident with teachers of core subjects. He complained that “they” did not view his courses as truly academic, his lack of teaching credentials possibly aggravating the situation. Students reported that some teachers would not play the school news program and that one teacher referred to it as a “music video.” Such problems were listed and reported to the principal for resolution, further demonstrating school alliances. On the other hand, he recognized that part of the need for his courses were the need for additional electives because courses like automechanics had been abandoned. Like the art teacher at Boarding High, the Suburban teacher had created a strong program that was entirely under his direction—in part because of the peripheral nature of the course—but he also had a strong alliance with school administration. Urban High had the most complicated arrangement because it involved three teachers with different teaching practices drawn at different times into a reform project. A representative from the reform project believed that the school administration actively prevented meaningful reform and seemed to have no hope for improvements even though a new principal had been appointed. The New Media teachers were isolated from the rest of the school, and the support from the reform was quickly dwindling, if ever the teachers felt supported by it; one teacher complained that he had not. The lack of power and solidarity within the New Media Academy and in its relations to the school was striking. The Media 1 teacher seemed entirely on his own and overwhelmed by it. One day he came in late, carrying groceries for his cooking classes. His good intentions led to efforts for a presentation of student works on two separate occasions, but these were gradually scaled back before being abandoned entirely. He was the teacher I first spoke with at the school, and he was generous in his invitation for me to come. He always expressed optimism. He met with me and the principal to discuss permission for me to conduct my study, and other trips to the office suggested he experienced some type of administrative support, but he often seemed distracted in class. He had been teaching only five years, barely longer than the existence of the New Media Academy. In addition to teaching media, social studies, and culinary arts, a sign indicated that he ran a student organization for “gay, lesbian, bisexual, and questioning students,” but I never found the time to ask him more about it because he always seemed busy and on the verge of exhaustion. It made sense that this teacher chose to stop teaching media at the end of the school year. The other two teachers had each other’s company in the spring of 2002, but they often seemed to be in each other’s way rather than finding ways of supporting each other. The Media 3 teacher had been teaching a long time and had been with the New Media Academy from the beginning, but the Media 2 teacher had come to the Academy later from a career in broadcasting—a career that, unlike the Suburban High teacher, was not technically oriented. This teacher was absent for the first month that I observed, however, because he was recovering from surgery. This resulted in the English and Media classes, which shared a room, to become merged for the most part until his return. Each teacher for the most part established class activities independently, making each the authority within their courses. The limits of this authority were apparent, however, when all productions were aborted in response to a problem with a prop gun, and concerns were expressed about the subject matter of student videos possibly being offensive to parents. The institutional constraint on the teachers’ power was most directly demonstrated in the inability of teachers to set limits on enrollment or on the necessity of prerequisites. Teachers are traditionally alone in their classrooms, but at the other two schools, other teachers and administration occasionally found reasons to visit. With the exception of covering for absences and one visit by a computer technician, no one from outside the classes ever appeared in either of the New Media classrooms. This combined with the location and condition of the classrooms to create a sense of having been forgotten. The degree of isolation of the Urban program was confirmed when a teacher from another school track, who was filling in for the Media 3 teacher one day, said that she had been brought into her academy as the media expert but had not known that the New Media Academy existed. This lends support to the assertions of the Media 3 teacher that the New Media Academy served as a dumping grounds for students who needed another class rather than as an academy in which students could build a sense of community while engaging with academics via new media. The Academy had no identity in the school. Perhaps the lack of connection—one expression of low solidarity—was largely true of all three programs but that it took on a more negative quality given the lack of purpose exhibited by the teacher’s at Urban High. The art teacher at Boarding High and the teacher at Suburban High had used their isolation and their lack of established guildlines and practices to establish a place with distinct ideologies that positioned the program within the school. At Boarding High, the art teacher had brought real art to the students for a more meaningful self-expression and broader exposure than the Native crafts that had previously been the only art education. The teacher at Suburban High had created not only a vocational program that required five class periods a day but a student produced show that benefited the entire school—replacing the daily announcements. At Urban High, the teachers tried to adopt an ideology they never fully understood, and then in trying to make something work, dabbled in so many ideologies that they became less relevant to the school. The constraints on their freedom to create an autonomous academy as intended and the constraints that prevented coordination between teachers (such as lack of time and support) were obstacles not found at the other two schools and thus represents the most significant difference. |
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