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Participation Styles And The Further Definition of Places


Much of this dissertation has been inspired by de Certeau’s work (1984) and his effort to define how people use the environments, the cultures, the products they consume. In this sense, students are “consumers” of the education prepared and presented by the institution of school, and development is sought in the way students use the products. Development is not in the system of buildings, objects, and people that create particular affordances but in the activity—the uses to which affordances are put. Defining the system of constraints and promotions defines only the conditions under which development occurs, not the developmental processes. It is only in considering the whole ideological complex, including the pieces the students bring to it, that a zone can be defined. And the way to begin, according to de Certeau, “is to make explicit the systems of operational combination” (p. xi) through an elaboration of strategies and tactics.

A strategy is defined as:
the calculation (or manipulation) of power relationships that becomes possible as soon as a subject of will and power (a business, an army, a city, a scientific institution) can be isolated. It postulates a place that can be delimited as its own and serve as the base from with relations with an exteriority composed of targets or threats (customers or competitors, enemies, the country surrounding the city, objectives and objects of research) can be managed. (De Certeau, 1984, p. 35-36)
A strategy at its most basic is understood as an act taken from a position of power. The act is literally or metaphorically positioned within a place such that the power of an institution (school, media, or student body) is contained in its objectives. By contrast, a tactic, understood loosely as an act taken from a position of weakness, is more properly defined as:
a calculated action determined by the absence of a proper locus. No delimitation of an exteriority, then provides it with the condition necessary for autonomy. The space of a tactic is the space of the other. Thus it must play on and with a terrain imposed on it and organized by the law of a foreign power. (p. 37)
Thus a teacher is able to use the classroom as a place where the proper activity is aimed toward education, and a student uses time to create opportunities, to divert agendas, to find holes in the teacher’s surveillance. These associations of a strategy with a place and a tactic with time are essential elements of de Certeau’s distinction.

This is, however, a simplification. De Certeau used the metaphor of war to describe everyday life, and he indicated that actions may “never present themselves is such a clear form” (1984, p. 39). The fact is that a place always belongs to the institution, not the individual, and to some degree, an individual is always left to tactics. Particularly in looking at student activity within schools, all the activity is by definition tactical—students are in a position of weakness in the school. The places referred to as student-owned places are more borrowed than owned. Students take advantage of the lack of surveillance and a momentary placement to “own” a hallway or a desk. The teacher also borrows the places provided by the institution, most obviously when teachers also must move from one classroom to another. It is the institution of teacher-hood or student-hood that owns the place. Nevertheless, individual (though not isolated) actions can be characterized as more or less strategic, more or less tactical, and in so doing, the quality of relations between the actor and the actants is revealed. By elaborating on the way students use their schools, the student-school relationship—not just the school’s relationship toward the students—becomes visible. The focus of an analysis according to de Certeau’s approach is undertaken primarily with student-made videos because of the level of detail that is thus made available and because of the material yet potentially symbolic nature of video activity.
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