Originally submitted for Education 307,
March 8, 1999
In her book, Teacher-Pupil
Conflict in Secondary Schools: An Educational Approach, K.A. Cronk explores
why students conflict with teachers.
Cronk uses interviews with the students as a research technique, as well
as time spent in the classroom. Cronk’s
conclusion is that most conflict occurred because the students failed to see
the teacher as human.
Cronk
outlines chronologically the way her research took place. She begins by outlining her theories on
morality. This part of the book was the
hardest to get through. It is both hard
to understand and boring to read.
However, once I got past the first sixty pages, the book became quite
enjoyable. Cronk outlines the
discussions she had with the students, followed by the experiment in which
Cronk taught the class for two periods every Wednesday. Finally, Cronk gives some of her
conclusions. Because of this format, the
book reads almost more like a story than a piece of academic research. The different children are portrayed vividly
and realistically. Much of the
conversation that took place is reproduced verbatim
and the idioms used are interesting. (Although
the author never says so, it is apparent that the book takes place in Britain.)
The first
chapter is the introduction. In it Cronk
lays the framework for the rest of the book.
She mentions Rogers’
belief that most conflict arises from teachers being too authoritative, and
conflict would be reduced if the teachers let the students see them as
human. Cronk states that, “Like Rogers, I believed this,
because I believed in the intrinsic morality and trustworthiness of
pupil-persons” (4). Cronk goes on to
qualify this belief, including “it is important to understand that the
suggested approach to pupil-teacher conflict does not contain a naïve hope that
if persons are ‘nice to each other’ all their problems will disappear.…Morality
is not conceived here as a body of ‘right’ answers, but a constant search for
the ‘best’ answers in a continuously changing present” (5).
The second
chapter, Theoretical Considerations, Cronk
describes the concept of intrinsic morality (the subject must be capable of choosing
his or her own behavior, and then must act altruistically). She outlines seven points which follow from
that, and describes each in more detail (exempli gratia If persons are moral,
they must be free).
Cronk then
goes onto talk about the support in academic literature for her concepts of
morality. Cronk writes about the problem
of determinism, and declares that none of the philosophical solutions to this
are satisfactory, and the only recourse left is to declare that humans are
organisms, “and to explore the physical sciences for evidence which would allow
them to be regarded as intelligent, creative, and moral organisms too”
(40). Cronk writes about this for a
while, and then applies what she wrote about to teacher-pupil conflict. By using Bohm’s analogy of humans as
miniature force fields, she concludes, “it is possible to maintain that
persons, as wholly physical systems, are ‘free’ in the full sense which is
required by the concept of intrinsic morality.”
In the
third chapter, 3Y and their teachers: a
case study of classroom conflict, Cronk gives background on 3Y, a class of
twelve boys and six girls between thirteen and fourteen, who come from
impoverished homes and many of them have police records. Cronk records briefly the teachers’ view of the
students and then interviews the students in the groups that they come in
with. She asks them for their complaints
concerning the teachers, and then compares the teachers’ views that the
students’ views, and concluded that one of the main problems was that the
students were misinterpreting the teacher’s motives.
Cronk than
observes the classroom. I thought it
interesting that the one teacher that the students unanimously approved of,
Cronk was not allowed to observe because she was a young probationary
teacher. She describes the way 3Y was
hard for the teachers to control, and the various techniques teachers would use
to attempt to control the class (exempli gratia teacher circling, in which the
teacher circled around the classroom so that his or her back was never to any
of the students for very long).
In the
fourth chapter, Experimental Design,
Cronk outlines the experiment, including the layout of the classroom, and the
rules that she proposed for both teachers and students based on the interviews
with the students.
In chapter
five, Lesson One to Four, Cronk
describes the beginning of the experiment.
In this experiment she taught the class for two periods every Wednesday,
and she envisioned that the class and her would continually dialogue until they
reached a set of rules and activities suitable for each. She describes this part of the experiment as
a disaster, in which she was continually losing control of the class and
beginning to believe in the students as the monsters they had been made out to
appear like by the other teachers. She
has difficulty getting the class to listen to her, to do any work, and the
class is obsessed with sex.
Chapter six
is entitled: The Effect of Teacher-Pupil
Discussion on General Classroom Behaviour.
In this she brings three of the boys in to talk about how to manage the
class. One of the boys said the only way
to solve anything was by strict punishment, which she was theoretically opposed
to. The other advocated a compromise by
which they would work for half of the class, and be allowed to play cards for
the second half. Despite reservations,
Cronk decided to implement this. She
describes the results (some improvement on their work), as well as the effect
this had on the rest of the class. Cronk
embarks on a quest to wean them away from their card playing by making the
curriculum more interesting.
In chapter
seven, The Relationship between Classroom
Behaviour and the Curriculum, Cronk describes the remainder of the lessons,
and her attempt to engage the card players.
She has frustrations with one of them, whom she goes to significant
effort to get started on a project he will enjoy, only to have him abandon it
without telling her. She says her
primary frustration with this student was that he did not treat her like she
was human. Cronk also describes the
conversations with the students at the end of the semester, and the conclusions
she drew. She claims that although there
were difficulties, she made much progress by the end of the semester, and many
of the students were doing more work than they previously had.
Cronk’s
unique experiment with this class was interesting. What I was most surprised by was the inability
of most of the students to articulate what they found so distasteful about school. Similarly, they had little helpful
suggestions to Cronk about how to improve it.
Almost all of them advocated strict punishment as the way to control the
class, yet reacted negatively when this was employed.
I find
little objectionable in Cronk’s thesis, but believe that perhaps she was a bit
too trusting in the goodness of human nature when she did her experiment, and
this accounts for much of the frustration she encountered.
Professor’s Comments: One of the most
important points she makes is that teachers and students hide within their
roles. It is the teacher’s task to work
through this situation.
This is a nice summary but missing
some of the crucial points.
Grade: B+
