Reflection about Power in the Classroom and in Society

Karen Valentina Beltrán

Johan Stic Mendoza
Mariana Flórez
Natalia Segura

From education, talking about power can be different points of view. It has a positive
impact and a negative side, due to the powerful influence the behaviors and attitudes,
especially in children and younger people. If teachers do not know how to manage the
power they have in the classroom and society, it can produce feelings of abuse, control, and
repression, which is why education is viewed negatively and dogmatically. However,
power is also an opportunity to help students and improve their relationship with
knowledge and change societies positively, valuing from the classrooms, culture, diversity,
differences and the students who belong to them making them feel valuable and participate.
For that reason, it is important to see both sides of this concept.

Teacher's power can be a mechanism of control and abuse in the classroom. To begin with,
many teachers have the idea that they have supremacy in the classroom, so they can do
anything without thinking about their implications. For example, they are rude to their
students because they make a mistake or they humiliate them due to they do not have
enough resources, ignoring their context and obstacles. In addition, some teachers consider
that their knowledge is the only valid one, so they do not value the abilities of their
students, which legitimizes the figure of a powerful teacher who does not allow spaces for
interaction in the class. Consequently, there is a bad use of power because it is implemented
to subordinate the students. Besides, some teachers assume that the best way to get respect
in the classroom is using their power extremely to conserve discipline and achieve superior
results, but they do not take into account that they may not respond to good learning but to
a fear of failing. That is, teachers use their power to control their students and preserve an
inflexible class as a way to guarantee a "better" education without considering the
repression that it generates and the obstacles it represents for their students. In brief, some
teachers use their power in the class in a negative and repressive way, neglecting most of
the elements that involve the classroom.

Power can be an opportunity to help the student to develop their insights. According to that,
teacher’s power can connect students inside the classroom to improve their relationships
and the acquisition of knowledge. In addition, students get agreement with teachers in a
proper academic way in order to make groups to work together in class; this encourages the
sense of speaking and the expression of ideas. Therefore, students will not feel
disempowered about the topics that can be seen in a subject curriculum. Furthermore,
teachers must allow their students to feel free in the sense of searching for knowledge in
order to contrast it with the one that takes place in the teacher study plan. Eventually,
teachers could be respected not only for their knowledge about the subject they teach, they
also can be seen as a model that teaches principles with no discrimination in the classroom.
Finally, relationships in which each student feels valued by the teacher, empowered
greatestly the assumption of the academic work in the class, it also can improve the critical
view and the problematization of the content of any subject.

To conclude, we can say that the school is the space in which all eyes are placed, hoping
that from there it will respond to the needs and problems of society, that is why it is
important to make an analysis about what is happening within education in relation to the
exercise of power. Thus, in the current era it is common to find a great problem when the
power exercised in the school is not correctly planned, which directly harms society. At this
point positive and negative results are evident, it is for this reason that it is necessary to
create a new culture of power, which is manifested in the order and in the acts understood
by all individuals, so that the strategies proposed can be functional and postividas, so that
education can meet the objectives indicated by its mission.