Managing to Be Different

Educational Leadership as Critical Practice

Ron Scapp

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781136076824
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Pedagogía
• Subtopic: Educación general

Ron Scapp moves teaching back to the center of scholarship on educational administration, asking how school leaders might connect their work more integrally with the ideals and practices of critical pedagogy.

1

WHO, ME? AN ADMINISTRATOR?

In the late 1970s I had the good fortune to work at LaGuardia Community College in Long Island City (L.I.C.), an industrial neighborhood just at the base of the Queens side of the 59th Street Bridge (the Queensborough Bridge). At the time, the area was a mixture of New York’s manufacturing past and its future as a center for technology, design, and the arts. In many ways, LaGuardia Community College represented the city’s transition from a major manufacturing locus into a new urban identity yet to be fully determined. It was a place of dynamic commercial and creative energy; it was also a place I knew well.

Since grammar school my friends and I roamed the streets of L.I.C. by bicycle and on foot because of its intrinsic appeal to us: railroad tracks, active and abandoned factories, cobblestone streets, access to the East River and Newton Creek, views of the Manhattan skyline, “old man” bars and a general sense that this was simultaneously one of the most artificial and natural places ever developed or inhabited.

LaGuardia Community College was originally sandwiched between a paper factory and a gum manufacturer. Farther east on Thomson Avenue there were the railroad yards and the freight trains that continuously moved goods of all sorts in and out of New York. Despite the fact that at the time the city was suffering from various local financial blunders and national economic setbacks, New York was still its ever-frenetic self. It was an edgy time, and L.I.C. was an edgy place. LaGuardia Community College was part of the undetermined future of this neighborhood, and its students, faculty, and staff were all part of the mix.

I began working as a tutor, specifically a literacy tutor. LaGuardia had a large and well-organized basic skills program with math, English, and reading components. The remedial courses offered through these different departments were a response to the combination of Vietnam vets coming back to or starting school with government monies, recent immigrants who were taking advantage of the full array of useful courses at LaGuardia, and “traditional” students seeking to work their way through a community college en route to a bachelor’s degree from one of the many four-year colleges in New York, but who could not go directly to such a college. LaGuardia was (and remains) an urban, multicultural, and intergenerational population striving to improve its understanding of the world, as well as its social and economic status. The faculty and staff at the college were a committed group of educators and administrators attempting to facilitate the teaching and learning that students sought at LaGuardia. I found myself amidst a community of diverse, hardworking, and ambitious people, a community that was transforming the city as much as it was transforming itself.

In 1979 I had been working at LaGuardia Community College for about four years. In June of that year I also finished my own undergraduate education and was thinking seriously about graduate school but hadn’t yet applied or even thoroughly investigated where I might go to pursue my studies. Although I had some overall sense of my future plans, upon graduation I found myself without an immediate next step to take. An interesting opportunity arose, however, and an unanticipated path was laid out before me. I was offered a full-time position as a master tutor-counselor; it was a hybrid position, part pedagogue and part administrator. One would think that someone fresh out of college, interested in a career as an educator and comfortable with his work and his colleagues at LaGuardia, would have jumped at the chance for a full-time academic job. Oddly enough, I didn’t. The reason for my hesitation seems, in retrospect, a bit immature, if not foolish.

Prior to the job offer, I had seen myself solely as a tutor. I had successfully developed relationships with students that proved effective in helping them raise their reading levels, and I also genuinely enjoyed the one-to-one tutoring and the group tutoring I was originally hired to do. I saw myself as a novice teacher, someone engaged with those who were learning and discovering things about themselves and the world at large, someone who was learning and discovering things about himself and the world, in large measure because of the students I served. I felt a sense of pride. I was proud of the direct and immediate role I played in the lives of the students of LaGuardia and I had little desire to disrupt or forfeit that dynamic, especially by becoming an administrator.

True, it was 1979, and the Sixties — even by a loose chronology — had long ago ended, but the thought of becoming an administrator — that is to say, part of the managing system — was hard for me to embrace. Naively, I found the prospect of joining the ranks of the institution’s establishment unappealing at best and prima facie somewhat hypocritical at worst. Wrongly, I took it as a given that administrators were the ones who made everything complicated and dogmatic, that people who wanted to really change things and help others had to stay clear of everything bureaucratic and connected with those “in charge.” As one could imagine, it was with a great deal of trepidation that I considered the offer. But consider it I did, and my sense of academic engagement was forever influenced by my choice to take the position. And though my initial hesitation to become an administrator was based on a flawed understanding, my experience, in many ways, proved even more daunting.

Almost as soon as I accepted the position, I learned my first important lesson: one cannot ignore workplace history. Although I had agreed to take a newly created position — a position with ostensibly no history — I encountered numerous people informing me of the history of the position, of my position. I was told why I was chosen and what problems lay ahead for me given the existing power structure, and I was informed about those people I needed to make peace with, if I ever hoped to be effective doing my job. (There were, it seems, more than just a few others considered for the job. Unbeknownst to me, one person in particular was viewed as the insider. This person, in fact, had been at LaGuardia much longer than I, and had made genuine contributions to the tutoring program. It turns out that this other tutor had even been part of the process of coming up with the job description for the position. In addition to people having different favorites, the very nature and purpose of the job was evidently being debated up until the last moment.) Within days, I was confronted by years of distrust, frustration, and disappointment at varying levels of intensity and consequence. The very same place I had come to know as a source of satisfaction and achievement was overnight transformed into a complicated and vexed field of political struggle. The new position I occupied quickly revealed itself to be an always already contested location; I immediately became a politico-historical focus of attention. I was now differently situated within the existing power dynamics of the institution. Who approached me and how they did so were, to my surprise, almost always predetermined by events and exchanges that occurred before, in some cases long before, my being hired. But all of that history, from my appointment forward, was to be somehow identified with me.

It is not so much the case that everyone assigned a direct causal link between me and the feuds and problems of the past; it was something more complicated and, at the same time, more simple than that. For reasons both understandable and farfetched, I automatically (and as I later on understood, axiomatically) became a hot spot on the institutional power grid. It wasn’t really about me, as such, but rather it was very much about that which was all around me, perhaps, more accurately, about all that which now ran through me. The moment I accepted the position, I became part of the circuitry of power, part of the surges, breaks, and relays of the institution, in a fashion not previously possible. Just by being inserted into the network in this manner, I was instantaneously connected to (and confronted by) the swirls of forces that characterize, and too often determine, much of what happens in institutions of all stripes, but certainly in higher education. The charged field was impossible to ignore, no less deny, yet the range of acknowledgment concerning its existence, the various modes of participation in it, and the different struggles underway by those seeking the status bestowed by it were neither straightforward nor always comprehensible, given the order of things. In short, not much made sense, at least at first.

In a relatively short time, I began to see, hear, and understand things in a different way. People said things they did not mean; they often did not say the things they did mean; they supported people they adamantly disagreed with; and they voted against proposals and people they claimed elsewhere to support. A small gesture such as nodding in agreement or not voicing an objection at a meeting concerning an otherwise innocuous issue could be taken as loud public endorsement. It could be seen as a move to mend old wounds, or that same gesture could be understood as an absolute betrayal of trust and an attack on someone’s credibility or value. Those in attendance, those who witnessed the said gesture, if prodded, could provide you with the history, the context, the significance of the “yes” or silence, of the “perhaps” or the “I am not sure.” As I learned, the power field is always charged. Saying hello or not noticing someone because you continued to read your newspaper while you were eating your lunch in the cafeteria could trigger speculation, emotional distress, and relief. Anything could set off a reaction; no place was neutral within the grid. Static was everywhere.

I was twenty-four years old and, until this job, felt mature. The fact is, I had not experienced such an expression of problems and issues in my prior working life. I had been working since I was a kid. From delivering papers to working behind the counter at a neighborhood candy shop, from hauling groceries to being an hourly worker at a national supermarket chain, I had witnessed and been part of a variety of power plays and games. But I never encountered anything quite like what transpired at LaGuardia. I had been party to or had suffered from a host of power dynamics before accepting my position as an administrator. They were the typical sorts of things: covering for people who were late; working harder to compensate for someone who was ill but could not afford to take time off; enduring bad moods and abuse from a boss who was in turn being abused; and trying to keep the peace between coworkers who hated each other. But none of this prepared me for what I was to encounter in my new position. I became afraid of electrifying myself or someone else by accidentally blinking, sneezing, or coughing at the wrong moment. I was forced to learn the history of things such as they were. The questions, of course, were how to learn this history and from whom, and what to do with what one learned.

As I have just suggested, one of the most interesting, perhaps profound, aspects of being plugged into the circuitry — even if in a minor role — is the fact that so much passes through you. (On another important [paradoxical] level it should also be noted how much typically gets rerouted or bypassed around individual circuits at particular moments.) What I want to emphasize here is the following point: if one is inserted, placed, or otherwise installed in the right position, and if this is done in the proper manner, it is virtually impossible not to be connected to other relays in the system. In short, it is not really an option to disconnect oneself, not to be part of the conductivity, without unplugging or removing oneself from the whole system — not an easy task. You can miss a meeting or two, but hiding is, at best, a short-lived strategy. However far-removed from the source of power or a given surge, regardless of how roundabout the route, each relay, each breaker serves a purpose, is in fact institutionally necessary to guarantee connectivity, if only for a particular moment. One’s circuitous function, then, is ultimately just as much a given in such a system as it is a consequence.

Within a year this circuitous function drove me from my job. I believe I might have stayed on longer, but I was accepted into a doctoral program in philosophy and decided to pull myself out. I did not exactly run from LaGuardia; I did, however, make a fairly quick exit. The process of learning about the circuitry, including the mistakes, the wrong moves, and the various malfunctions, convinced me that I would never again be an administrator. I wrongly assumed that unplugging oneself from administrating unplugged one from the circuitry. It would be quite some time before I realized that any connection to the power grid establishes conductivity. When I left LaGuardia, I simply assumed I was done with such matters. The truth, of course, was very different; I had only experienced my first conscious engagement with power and academia.

It is not that I had not experienced the relationship between power and education before LaGuardia; I had. Throughout my school life I had encountered many instances of power. From being removed from class to participating in an ongoing dialogue on racism in high school, from being part of student government to helping establish a successful mini-school (see The Learning Community by James Penha and John Azrak), it is fair to say that I experienced and understood something about the nature of power dynamics in education. I was, however, unaware of education as a professional arena — that is, unaware of academia. It wasn’t until my employment (deployment?) at LaGuardia that a whole new dimension of power revealed itself and made its impact upon me.

In many ways I was frightened by my position at LaGuardia and I genuinely suspect that it was fear, more than anything else, that made me leave. I do not say this without some lingering embarrassment, but it is the case that I was scared. I was frightened by different things but was most worried about becoming someone or something I did not wish to become, namely an administrator. As I mentioned previously, I thought of myself as an educator, a facilitator of learning, not as part of the network of institutional power. At LaGuardia, I was frightened by the prospect of failing to remain engaged with students and colleagues in a creative and politically open manner. I assumed that becoming an administrator would, by definition, alter the nature of my relationships and turn me away from teaching. I incorrectly equated being an administrator with being an administraitor.

Regardless of how naïve or immature my assessment of the nature of things was, this is how I did in fact see things. For me everything creative and liberating was associated with teaching and learning; administrating was something that others, who could not or should not teach, did instead. This attitude emanated from a number of different sources, one of which was the desire to study and do philosophy. At the time my interest in philosophy, based on an aesthetic as well as an ethical impulse, made me hesitant to become part of the machinery of an institution, part of the controlling and limiting forces at work defining and deploying ways of being that intellectually and instinctively went counter to my own attempts to be different. As I saw it, there wasn’t much difference, if any, between being an administrator and being a representative of bureaucracy in general. I imagined myself otherwise. I was part of a movement away from monitoring and disciplining and part of a larger cultural effort to support and assist others in the continuing struggle for social justice, a struggle that took place in classrooms and on the streets but not in offices. The years and experiences prior to my entering academia had influenced me away from the offices that housed administrators and managers and toward those who occupied the classrooms. My disposition was contrary to that of the position I was offered. I was temperamentally the wrong guy in the wrong place at the wrong time.

The French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu makes much of this notion of “disposition” and one’s inclination to act or behave one way or another in different settings and circumstances. In his introduction to Bourdieu’s Language and Symbolic Power, John B. Thompson describes the notion of disposition in the following way:

Dispositions are acquired through a gradual process of inculcation in which early childhood experiences are particularly important. Through a myriad of mundane processes of training and learning, such as those involved in the inculcation of table manners (‘sit up straight,’ ‘don’t eat with your mouth full,’ etc.), the individual acquires a set of dispositions which literally mould the body and become second nature. The dispositions produced thereby are also structured in the sense that they unavoidably reflect the social conditions within which they were acquired. An individual from a working-class background, for instance, will have acquired dispositions which are different in certain respects from those acquired by individuals who were brought up in a middle-class milieu. (Bourdieu, 13)

Whether you consider Bourdieu’s perspective a wrongheaded throwback to Marx and Freud, or see his work as fundamental to understanding contemporary social practices, I want to emphasize the notion that my disposition(s) played an important role in my engagement as an administrator and my decision to quit. Who you are (however that may be defined or explained) determines how you are — how you act, negotiate, respond, and so on. The ways in which you have come to work your way through circumstances and situations make an imprint on you as well as the world around you. Your way of responding, your strategies, and even the way you move your body are not just actions, but expressions of a certain way of being. Cumulatively over time, these expressions of who you are, are your history, your lasting mark on the world, others, and yourself. Facile as it may sound, who you have been becoming endures. As Thompson notes:

Structured dispositions are also durable: they are ingrained in the body in such a way that they endure through the life history of the individual, operating in a way that is pre-conscious and hence not readily amenable to conscious reflection and modification. Finally, the dispositions are generative and transposable in the sense that they are capable of generating a multiplicity of practices and perceptions in fields other than those in which they were originally acquired. (13)

In this sense, who we have been — how our bodies have been molded — influences how we will be, how we will act.

Such a perspective, however, should not be understood as endorsing a strict or narrow sense of determining how one becomes who one is. Instead, the reference to Bourdieu should be taken as useful description. By this I mean that, in my opinion, Bourdieu’s notion of disposition helps us better understand the various ways people from different backgrounds behave in power struggles — that is to say, how they behave within different power grids. It is in the rich and complex context of social attitudes (dispositions) and practices (not fixed rules) which evolve over time that, according to Bourdieu, inform (not predetermine) our actions and reactions. Beyond the analysis and description of what is commonly called character, typically evoked by those claiming to articulate and identify leadership qualities and other aspects of behavior, Bourdieu’s work extends our understanding of the fullness and texture of one’s inclinations and propensities based on the intricate and complicated range of one’s lived experience. As I mentioned in the introduction, throughout this book I will continue to make use of Bourdieu, and others, in order to suggest different ways of thinking about and responding to power in general and specifically within an academic setting — that is, to suggest ways of managing to be different.

When I left LaGuardia, I was convinced that I would not need to think ever again about being an administrator or manager. I would teach and do my thing (write, present papers, etc.), leaving all the other stuff to somebody else, anybody else actually. It wasn’t that my life as a lower-level administrator was horrible; clearly people around the world have endured genuine hardships far greater than being anxious about stepping on the toes...