Chapter 1: Living and Working within The Institution of Schooling: Authority as Pedagogy of the Everyday

The school as a foundational context for psychological development has long been a focus of inquiry. Understanding life in schools is fundamental to the project of relational theories of mind that seek to explain the ways in which concrete social systems bear on psychological functions. In the following, we introduce an argument about a broadly based conception of the “social” practice of authority as everyday pedagogy and then apply it to the study of authority in school change. Central to this argument is an understanding of power and control in the social formation of mind.

The line of inquiry builds on a body of research that has brought together post-Vygotskian theoretical perspectives on the social formation of mind with models of cultural transmission developed by Bernstein (Daniels, 2008, 2010). Our approach highlights authority as an outcome of relations of power and principles of control operating across the levels of institution, organization and person (Eddy Spicer, 2011, 2012). The perspective articulates ways in which the interactional order at the organizational level of schooling may be viewed as explicitly pedagogical. The relationship is pedagogical not in the usual sense that one associates with teacher-and-pupil but in a more expansive sense of establishing institutionally-conditioned relations that place one collective in a leading role as transmitter and another collective in supporting roles as acquirers (Bernstein, 2000; Daniels, 2008). Authority is made substantive through pedagogical relations between transmitters and acquirers.