Manifestation of Teachers’ Power in the Classroom
Soraya
In transmitting knowledge to the students and creating conducive situation
for students in the classroom, a teacher performs different kinds of role.
He/she acts as controller, organizer, assessor, prompter, participant, resource,
tutor, and observer (Hammer: 56-62). Generally, a teacher has power/authority
in the classroom in any role that he/she applies. When managing the class,
explaining the lessons, or checking the students’ work, teacher needs to state
his/her authority/power implicitly and explicitly. Power, according to Foucault
as quoted by Talbot (2003:2) is a force and effect which exists and circulates
in a web of social interaction. Van Dijk (2001: 300)
states that power involves control from a member of a group to other group in
form of action and cognition: that is a powerful group may limit the freedom of
action of others but also influence their mind. Thus, through their power,
teachers have more domination to influence not only the students’ action but
also their mind because in the classroom there is asymmetrical relation.
Teacher has institutionalized power over the students.
In education, whoever becomes a teacher, he/she will have the power over the
students. This power is needed by teacher in order to make sure that the learning
process runs well. The manifestation is not always in form of orders/command.
Sometimes, statement, question, or other speech strategies can be used to
manifest their power. Then, in reality, how do teachers manifest the power?
Here, I try to reveal teachers’ manifestation of power in the classroom using
critical discourse analysis by analyzing their speech
act as they conducted various roles. Jane Willis divided spoken discourse in
the classroom into inner, which consists of target language form that the
teacher has selected in the learning goal, and outer which consists of language
which is used to socialize, organize, explain, check, and generally to enable
pedagogic activities to take place. The data are outer spoken discourse which
is taken from a small research in STBA LIA Jakarta. The data will be analyzed as teachers conduct their role, specified in being
controller, organizer, assessor, and participants.
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Soraya. (2005, March). Manifestation of
teachers’ power in the classroom. Paper presented at LIA
International Conference, Jakarta, Indonesia.
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