3: Pedagogical Paradigms: The Teacher-Student Power Relationship

Nancie Atwell’s, In the Middle, Lucy Calkins’, The Art of Teaching Writing, and Linda Rief’s, Seeking Diversity, are primarily informational texts written for a teacher audience. As is evident from the previous chapter, the Writers’/Readers’ workshop aims to break away from traditional educational practices. While it is important to acknowledge this shift, it is also important to recognize ways in which the workshop may perpetuate components of a more traditional paradigm while at the same time creating spaces for a more radical one. With this in mind, the purpose of this chapter is to examine how power relations between student and teacher are conceptualized within the workshop approach as set forth by the three texts under examination. In the discussion that follows, the emergent theme under consideration is discussed as it applies to each text individually so as to allow the uniqueness within each text to be evident. However, this approach also allows for a cross comparison of each of the themes across the texts.