The Classroom as Stage

Abstract

This article explores the social-psychological process of identity negotiation in collaborative teaching, using Erving Goffman's (1959) theoretical tradition of dramaturgy to analyze the classroom itself as a performance venue. A dramaturgical analysis of collaborative teaching is especially significant given this growing pedagogical trend because identity negotiation in team teaching has the potential to impact one's teaching, one's career, and students' learning. We demonstrate that despite the positive outcomes of collaborative teaching for both teachers and learners, building a successful team is a process that takes time, effective communication, risk taking, and trust. Most significantly, sustaining a clear definition of the situation in the classroom is a challenge when a teaching team is engaged in the ongoing negotiation of roles, power, and course structure—in front of students. We argue that making identity claims in a collaborative team teaching situation is both more challenging and rewarding than acting alone on the classroom stage.

‘Social Science Teacher? Anyone Can Become’: Examining Professional Subject Identity of Social Science Teachers in India

“…For if the individual's activity is to become significant to others, he must mobilize his activity so that it will express during the interaction what he wishes to convey' (Goffman, 1959, p. 30) Idealisation This describes a 'performance that is "socialized" moulded and modified to fit into the understanding and expectations of the society in which it is presented' (Goffman, 1959, p. 35) Why and how does Goffman's work become a relevant model to examine teacher identity, particularly outside of Anglo-American society, which was the original laboratory of his own research? The positionality of the classroom as a stage lending itself to the dexterous management of performance by teachers in their workaday lives (King, 1973;McCoy, 2017;Preves & Stephenson, 2009) highlights the ubiquity of Goffman's constructs, particularly given the multidimensionality and reconstructive characteristics of teacher personal and professional identity (Beijaard & Meijer, 2017). Its application in the Indian context is hitherto uncharted but may offer thought-provoking perspectives, especially as teachers are groomed to undertake a ritualised set of techniques (Batra, 2014;Gupta, 2017) and are often perceived as 'meek dictators' (Kumar, 2014).…”

Interdisciplinary Team Teaching: Reflections on Praxis and Pedagogy in an Undergraduate Classroom

“…Turn-taking is not always successful or even considered, however. In their own classroom, for example, Preves and Stephenson (2009) provide collaborative faculty with a warning as they recognized a failure "in constructing and performing a consistent and unified definition of the situation in the classroom itself. Instead of providing a coherent working consensus for students, we provided ongoing and unpredictable shifts in directive dominance" (254-255).…”

“…Drawing from Goffman's theories of dramaturgy, they exhort faculty to consider how they manage both "on stage" and "backstage" moments of negotiating classroom space, noting when collaborative teaching "backstage" moments that typically occur during planning sessions move "on stage" into the classroom, students may be confused. Integrating Shibley's explanation of modeling wellexecuted turn-taking (2006), and mindful of Preves and Stephenson (2009) reflections on managing "backstage" and "on stage" moments, we directly shared with students the reasons for our turn-taking and what we learned from each other. This helped us to model learning, turn-taking, and question probing across disciplines, bringing our unified "backstage" to the "on stage" in a clear and purposeful way.…”

Collaborative Teaching Model: Synergy of Teaching Assistants in a First-year Engineering Course During the Pandemic

“…There are numerous successful collaborative models for teaching. While the majority of research on collaborative teaching involve faculty to faculty collaborations [3][4][5], there are teaching collaborations that exist between faculty and undergraduate students [6,7] or faculty and graduate students (in their PhD programs) [8]. However, there is only limited research examining teaching collaborations that involve among undergraduate and graduate students in a course.…”

“…Several studies have indicated that successful collaborative teaching models primarily highlighted collaborative teaching among faculty member [4,5,12,13]. These studies outlined the advantages of co-teaching, like enhancing "more reflexive pedagogy as well as richer and less hierarchical relations between students and faculty, but also points to complications, dislocations and challenges in negotiating the shared classroom stage" [8].…”