Strategies and Tactics in Education

As I read de Certeau’s The Practice of Everyday Life, I tried to think about his discussion and apply certain parts of it within a familiar frame—the educational system in general and more specifically, the writing program on campus. I found de Certeau’s discussion of strategies and tactics intriguing in regards to the hierarchal structure of a university. Dr. Charles Schuster points out that, “Part of the problem results from the inevitable hierarchic relations that obtain within the academy. University life is class life, almost feudal in its stipulation of working class and ruling class” (Ward and Carpenter 335). There are many types of power and one way of using power is to employ strategies. Teachers use strategies to maintain control over their students: there are punishments in place for students not completing an assignment in a proper or timely fashion, not attending class, plagiarizing, etc. Students are similar to the workers that de Certeau discusses—those who employ certain tactics. Students find ways to focus their attention on other tasks besides what is relative to the classroom activity; they text message, surf the internet, sleep, etc. Interestingly, instructors can also use tactics to work against the institution. As Professor Hildy Miller writes, “Instructors have to balance nonauthoritarian forms of leadership with institutional conventions, such as assigning grades, that run counter to our own guiding ideologies” (Ward and Carpenter 78). When there is a set curriculum, teachers may find themselves pushing the boundaries and implementing their own teaching methods if they disagree with the department or institution’s idea of what students need to learn and how to teach. This may be starting to change as a more collective power is becoming desirable rather than individual power. Miller states, “Rather than cultivating ‘power over,’ an effective leader focuses on ‘being peer’….To lead, then, is not to dominate but rather to facilitate, to share power, and to enable both self and others to contribute” (Ward and Carpenter 82). This collaborative network of power is one that is circular and always in motion and all of the elements work to define the other. It seems that no matter what form power takes, strategies and tactics will always play a role in order to gain desires or to resist the inevitable control.
I also found Foucault’s philosophy of the panoptic telling in terms of education. Everywhere on campus there are examples of people being observed and unaware of this observation and there are other examples of those who think that they may be under observation but are not quite sure. I was reminded of this when a professor said that “the eyes from the tower (I assumed this person was referring to the administration building) were always watching.” More specifically, in the U of A writing program, there is a hierarchal structure in place that has a system of surveillance. From the writing program administrator to the TEADs (teaching advisors), GATs (graduate assistant teachers) and the student body, there is panopticism. The invisible observations made through reports and files and even the teacher’s gradebook function by turning individuals into case files. Although the majority of the observation in a panopticon is invisible, for the panopticon to be successful there have to be visible observations as well, such as meetings and classroom visits. These visible aspects serve to remind people that they are being observed and that certain repercussions can occur. Kristin