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For this concluding chapter, I will 1) review the theories, both critical and communicative, that have informed the research so far, and 2) review what the research I've done has said in light of my theoretical presuppositions. The results will likely be indeterminate; this is a preliminary study, intended to understand whether this sort of ethnographic study, combined with this sort of theoretical position, could discover anything of significance at all, with respect to a field within the social drama that I marked "politics," and that I marked "politics" because public education in the state of California, as shown through events such as the passage of Proposition 227, is a political event, beholden to the public for its continued funding, beholden to a larger schoolwide, districtwide, and ultimately statewide hierarchy for its general design, and responsible to the public for any criticism that might come up about the way education is done, criticism that becomes "politics" insofar as it is performed as a political event.

My original theoretical perspective was based upon the theories of symbol and ritual of Victor Turner. Turner was concerned to see the routines of a society or of a group of people as "ritual" -- with his reference group for the analysis of ritual being a group called the Ndembu, who live in southern Africa. Turner analyzed Ndembu ritual (and the ritual of various other societies across the globe including American society) through an elaboration upon the framework of Van Gennep, who looked at "liminal" rituals, where a group of people would separate from the larger society in order to temporarily relieve themselves of the stresses of life in that larger society. Discussing school in terms of ritual initially looked like a good choice of discursive forms for me to use for this dissertation, since public schooling does indeed look like a ritual as the mainstream students of ritual would observe it (see Ronald Grimes' Beginnings in Ritual Studies for a more detailed mainstream study of ritual).

Indeed there are a wide variety of ritual phases to the elementary school day, with students adopting a wide variety of postures and gestures; recess, lunch, centers, calendar, seatwork, art, physical education, mathematics, quiet reading time. Within these ritual phases, I had hoped to understand where ideals about what schooling could be, especially my own ideals of "critical pedagogy." I wanted to understand realities of what schooling is and of what people say schooling is for, and to understand its potential for change, what it could be, the present and subjunctive questions about schooling. I also wanted to study "the politics of culture" within schooling.

But later, after much more detailed analytical thought about the schools I was observing, I started to conceptualize school as a disciplinary event, and relying upon the writings of Michel Foucault to characterize what I was seeing. For the most part, Foucault reflected what I was seeing in classrooms I substituted, in 4th grade and upward (through high school graduation). The children's bodies I was observing were "the object and target of power" (Foucault p. 137). Children were being trained to sit down and perform seatwork according to "general formulas of domination" (p. 138) that ran by the name of "classroom management," and that if I did not teach as if this were true, then I was going to invite serious administrative reprimand, especially in dealing with "at-risk" students. Even so, I began to seize upon Foucault's (1977) notion of discipline as the political economy of detail.

So from there I started to wonder what part of Foucault's analysis of discipline did not encompass the ritual I was observing. It could be the part of the ritual of a classroom day under the substitute where the children found the biggest opportunity to rebel, and resist, the official dictate that classrooms be opportunities for seatwork. I've seen plenty of acting-out, frustration, rebellion in these classrooms -- high school students who would cluster together in peer groups and talk demeaningly of me and of other students while dismissing my attempts to get them to do any work, the classroom I discussed previously, whose favorite activity was in going to the grassy area of campus and tearing up the grass and throwing it at each other, 6th graders who ran out of the classroom after dirtying the floor and tables in the classroom with paints, and then would sneak out of the classroom to the girls' bathroom to have a paint-fight. In this case I called the assistant principal, and the principal stormed into the classroom and helped us all clean up the paint and criticized the whole class for "running a circus."

But such rebellion easily becomes the object of discussion between the students and the adult authority figures in the class, and the inevitable administrative reaction to all such rebellions was swift, in its revocation of "privileges" (granted ritual periods of play) and its imposition of the environment of quiet, solemn work, or classroom suspension, combined with the adult attempt (not always successful) to impose the interpretation of "punishment" upon the imposed activity.

So in rebellion we are back to the dynamic of adult attempts to impose the model of "docile bodies" upon the schooling process. Rebellion may be a stellar example of student initiative -- it is through an understanding of "the politics of culture" with respect to schooling that we can see its powerlessness as an event. Rebellion as ritual produced behavior that can be seen as latently political, yet the performance of such rituals invited an adult reading which foreclosed an understanding of its power in favor of an adult-centered model of the purpose of education as "holding the lid down" on students whose behaviors could be disruptive, without reading the student-centered subtext that might have produced the rebellion.

(In one 2nd grade classroom I was observing, the teacher attempted to punish some students for disobedience, but the students did not appear to understand that they were being punished. From that observation I came away with the impression that "punishment" is a learned behavior, as is being a "docile body.")

However, perhaps other instances of student-directed behavior, behavior the later Foucault would consider under the rubric of "dominating oneself," would be important as indicators of a schooling process not entirely dominated by the "docile bodies" model. The model that the later Foucault advocated was one of "mastery of the self," which was usually the creation of oneself as a moral subject capable of performing moral action:

In short, for an action to be "moral," it must not be reducible to an act or a series of acts conforming to a rule, a law, or a value. Of course all moral action involves a relationship with the reality in which it is carried out, and a relationship with the self. Such "mastery of the self" needs to be distinguished from "mastery by the teacher" as is ostensibly imposed upon students through systems of classroom management. I am referring to student initiatives that do not start with teacher initiatives. (Foucault 1985, p. 28)

In some classroom situations, students were able to avoid conflict with each other, so that I felt comfortable in diverging from the systems of external reinforcement that were a central focus of Discipline and Punish. In these classes I tried negotiating individually with students, or meeting with them in "community circle" as advertised in TRIBES. Most of these classes that I taught were in the younger grades; the fact that grades K-3 usually had 20 students per teacher rather than 32 students per teacher (as was the standard maximum ratio throughout every class 4-12 in the state of California) was a controlling factor in allowing personal relations, and also perhaps in allowing the regular teacher to teach students how to exert self-discipline toward their own learning aims. Arguably, student learning of moral conduct could be considered latent politics, in that students that sought to fashion themselves as moral subjects might also want to be part of the decision as regards how their education was to proceed.

However, classrooms attained more ludic potential by 4th grade, since by then the student-teacher ratio increased so that there are 32 students in each classroom (and thus more students are there to disrupt the continuity of instructional ritual), and the curriculum of 4th grade (and beyond) seemingly becomes at the same time less ludic, more chained to seatwork (or perhaps the teachers become more fond of these things; to me as substitute teacher, it amounted to the same thing), so that the tension between ludic and serious modes of classroom performance becomes a struggle to establish "order" or "play" within the classroom that occluded any attempts I might make to understand "self-domination" within these classroom environments, in terms of watching children form themselves as moral subjects as they grew older.

Since I chose substitute teaching as the vehicle for these observations, my ability to record them was hampered by my need to perform the rituals of a substitute teacher, taking attendance, insuring on-task behavior, monitoring physical education or centers, arranging students in some particular pattern. Thus it might be said that not only is ethnographic observation by substitute teachers cluttered with duties to be performed by the person who's supposed to report the ethnography, it is also deprived of time and energy that might be spent in taking ethnographic jottings, tape- or video-recording classroom proceedings, photographing the scenes of classroom ritual, or intensively interviewing its subjects. This, perhaps, is why Norman L. Friedman ("High School Substituting: Task Demands and Adaptations in Educational Work," Urban Education 18:1 April 1983 pp. 114-126) can only presuppose communicative behaviors, while describing them in relatively thin detail. He tells us: The substitute has to quickly (in the first few minutes, or even as students come in before the bell rings for class to start) manage and convey the impression of "being a teacher" -- that is, of being or appearing to be just as much a "real teacher" and adult authority figure as is the regular teacher (p. 120)

and then goes on to tell us about the presence or absence of this quality called "impression management" without defining in communicative terms what it is for any particular class. My own suspicion is that Friedman was too busy managing impressions to arrive at any objective description of "impression management."

The problem with arriving at such a definition might have been related to the job of the substitute teacher -- since students are sizing up "subs" according to either comparative notions of what they're like compared to the regular teacher or another substitute, or subjunctive notions of what a perfect substitute teacher might be like, the "sub" remains ill-informed about what effect his or her behavior is going to have.

Substitute teaching thus produces "chaotic" data that resist being molded into the form of a scientific experiement. One might see new groups of students every day, or a new impression from a teacher who might expect one to be at a school for a certain number of days before going elsewhere. But nevertheless I conclude that substitute teaching showed me potentials that might have gone unreported had nobody gone forward to do an "ethnography of the sub." Students showed me that they could try to control the ritual situations in their classrooms, that they could fashion themselves as subjects.

Thus what I've attempted to do is produce an "off-the-wall," marginal, liminal ethnography that appropriates experience in order to try to stimulate it with a theory of "latent politics," so that later researchers might do a more thorough job in documenting the potentials that I can only here suspect, and outline.

Subbing is a great opportunity to discover the strength of the "counter-discourse" in classrooms where there is a counter-discourse. The students are communicating to you, the ethnographer-substitute, and the conditioned communication between student and teacher that occurs in totally-scripted instructional ritual has been put in a subjunctive mode ("if the regular teacher were here, this would be a normal day, but since the teacher isn't here...") because you're not the regular teacher. You're the substitute teacher. So you get to see things the regular teacher might not get to see, and the "counter-discourse" phenomenon is one of them. Since the role of the substitute teacher puts in a subjunctive case the power of the regular teacher, it might be interestingly situated to observe the potential that can be appropriated from the politics of culture in the classroom. One isn't sure what one is observing when one is observing the "counterdiscourse," whether one is observing a reaction to one's own teaching, or a reaction to the conditioning the students have received from the regular teacher, but whatever one sees is an indicator of the degree to which the classroom has been made into a place where public discourse is appreciated or disparaged.

The substitute teacher, it should be clear, is politically impotent to change the system of education as a whole, to intervene in the politics of culture that he or she observes every work day. Most of this impotence has to do with the transiency of subsitute teaching and the powerlessness of the substitute as an on-call day laborer. The value of substitute teaching as an ethnographic tool is in bringing to consciousness another form of classroom politics, one not to be observed as performed ritual not merely by going along with the normalcy imposed by regular teachers.

However, what I tried to show by introducing the topic of Proposition 227, of classroom testing, and of classroom discipline in order to reveal a "politics," was that in talking about "the political," it is important for academic thinkers to distinguish between the manifestly political, the changes that are made by politicians or by those who succeed at having their laws passed by statewide initiative process, and the latently political, the small-scale political action that occurs each day as teachers, students, principals etc. assert themselves in the world. The politics of schooling on the manifest level (as I experienced it in southern California) operates on the level of law and policy -- a policy is inscribed into law or mandate, a district response to that policy is communicated, and material aspects of the school systems of southern California are affected -- as regards who can teach in one, what may they teach, how much teachers are paid, what equipment will the State buy for them, who may serve them administratively, etc. All of which has repercussions in the discursive debate about "what school is for" -- the Unz initiative starts with an affirmation that "literacy in the English language is among the most important" of skills taught by the public school system," for instance.

There is also, however, a latent politics, and to find this latent politics one must look to instructional ritual as it occurs each day in each classroom. I have sought to unearth such latent politics within the implications of instructional ritual for "what schooling is for." How one views instructional ritual in this light depends on what one views it as doing. Is it a ludic event, celebrating play, and what does that play itself produce? Does it exist for the sake of producing high test scores, or successful evaluations of "classroom discipline," or students literate in English, or math, or technology? What priorities are displayed each school day by students and teachers?

Manifest politics, to be sure, has a role in shaping the latent politics of everyday classroom life. Part of the identity of classrooms has to do with the fact that they are funded a certain way (20 students per teacher for grades k-3 classrooms in California, 32-1 for grades 4-12), that they must obey certain laws and mandates (Proposition 227, for instance, or the "Lau v. Nichols"-based mandate for bilingual education, or the mandated Stanford 9 test for instance, or any of the previously mandated statewide standardized tests). But an identity for classrooms was also forged through the relation of the classroom life to the "script" that was offered or the "invitation" that was given by the teacher to the students, for the sake of instructional ritual. Is the script being used productively by the students to produce a valued thing? Does the script generate a "counterdiscourse" and an "underlife" that then becomes the main object (and objective) of student life in the classrooms? The resolution of these issues in any particular classroom, school, district, or state, would seem to have quite a lot of "say" in "what schools are for." But, so far, the latent political issues of instructional ritual appear only as latent issues. Teaching style is "left up to the individual teacher" as sequestered in an isolated classroom, or it's given advice about "classroom management" in teacher training programs. Giving students a "choice" in their instructional rituals appears to be a matter that has today not yet become part of any political program.

Proposition 227 will affect the above, latent political issue, insofar as it will, in many districts, replace one set of scripts marked "bilingual" with another set of scripts marked "immersion," and forbid the teaching of some scripts using non-English languages. The provision that "all children be placed in English language classrooms," where the "language of instruction used by the teaching personnel is overwhelmingly the English language," (Proposition 227, Article 2. 305-306) would seem to eliminate non-English language scripts for learning, and this will (in Moorman and Dishon's words) reduce the number of possible "invitations to learn" teachers can offer. One could, as a result of this provision, conceivably observe classrooms where the teacher script is spoken in English and becomes a "procedural display" and the student counterscript is spoken in Spanish and becomes the unintended focus of learning, with the effects Gutierrez et al. (1996) describe. But the danger of instructional ritual becoming "procedural display" existed before 227.

One immediate danger facing California administrators, as they see it, is the absence of a script for immersion education, or a textbook for student use, or a preparatory college program for teachers of limited-English students that will help them comply with the new law. Victoria Castro, president of the Los Angeles USD School Board, says of Proposition 227, "There is no college or system to prepare us for this. Everyone will have to go through the initial chaos together" ("Prop. 227's 'Bumpy Ride," Los Angeles Times 7/20/1998, p. B8.). I imagine the problems I face when, as a substitute teacher, I confront a classroom without a lesson plan, with a limited number of clues as to how I can invent a script for a day's activities, and then I imagine this problem magnified into a districtwide problem.

During that small portion of the total time spent when I wasn't following a lesson plan and had some room to invent, my own practice as a substitute teacher emphasized education as an event involving "play" applications of learning material. It centered on adaptation to a classroom that was (for the most part) in the lower elementary grades. My practice seemed to operate thusly because, to a certain extent, children under my care were playing anyway, and even if I "cracked down" on it they would use my attempts to "discpline" as an object of play in itself. This practice seemed to "generate itself" out of my inquiries into the constant impulse to discourse that almost all students in the Valley Unified School District seemed to exude.

In behaving thusly as a substitute teacher, I hope to have contributed positively to the learning experiences of very young people, who may have learned important social and literacy skills through my efforts to communicate with them. I developed a respect for the designers of "semi-critical classroom management" insofar as their designs for instructional ritual attempted to use the "counterdiscourse" of the students as the raw material of instructional ritual, while at the same time discovering the limitations of my role within a politicized social system that delivers instructional ritual to students.

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Chapter 7 -- Online Documents -- Introduction