Perceptions of self and other in the elementary classroom - From George Spindler's 'Roger Harker Story' to today's classrooms - 9361976294088171127.pdf

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Perceptions of Self and Other in the ElementaryClassroom: From George Spindler’s “Roger Harker Story”to Today’s Classrooms

CHRISTINE FINNAN

College of Charleston

Consistent with research conducted by George Spindler 60 years ago, teachers continue to perceive groups of students, typically students that differ from the teacher, as less capable of accomplishingmeaningful tasks, belonging and contributing to social groups, and engaging actively in challeng-ing work. The bias is especially great for students who struggle to perform academically. The articlereflects on the importance of teacher effects on students’ developing sense of self, especially in ouraccountability age. [George Spindler, self-concept, perceptual bias, accountability]

Throughout his career, George Spindler provided a unique view of schools and theteaching and learning process. Sixty years ago, he became one of the first anthropologiststo make a U. S. elementary school classroom, Roger Harker’s classroom, a research site. Hetook up the challenge to make this very familiar venue strange, using a holistic approachto understanding the dynamics of a classroom culture. He not only observed the teacherand how he delivered lessons, but Spindler also focused on the social dynamic betweenthe teacher and students and among the students. This research experience profoundlyinfluenced his career and became a centerpiece of his courses and lectures for decades tofollow. For the next 50 years, Spindler used the “Roger Harker story” to remind under-graduate and graduate students of the disconnections and challenges of teaching, and of

the profound effect teachers have on students’ developing sense of self. George Spindler,and his partner, his wife Louise, were pioneers in turning an anthropological lens oneducation and in seeing schools and classrooms as more than venues for the transmissionof information from adults to children. The Spindlers highlighted the influence of schoolsand classrooms on students’ developing sense of self (which Hoffman [1998] describes asa “pedagogy of selfhood”).

This paper returns to the Roger Harker story and ties it to the Spindlers’ commitmentto understanding the relationship between our sense of self and the schooling experience.In the article, I delve into the Spindlers’ concepts of self to identify the aspects of self thatare critical to success in classrooms and suggest that, like Roger Harker, teachers todaycontinue to favor students most like themselves. In addition, I extend the story and present

the classroom as a venue in which teachers’ as well as students’ sense of self is confirmedor disconfirmed. I suggest that teachers rely on students’ academic performance toconfirm their sense of self, resulting in a tendency to favor students with strong academicperformance. I contend that this tendency is exacerbated by the current standards andaccountability climate, especially in Title I schools.

The Roger Harker Story

In 1951, George Spindler spent six months studying an ethnically and socioeconomi-cally diverse fifth grade classroom in northern California as part of a Stanford University

research project working with local schools. The teacher, Roger Harker, was a

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Anthropology & Education Quarterly, Vol. 44, Issue 1, pp. 94–103, ISSN 0161-7761, online ISSN 1548-1492.© 2013 by the American Anthropological Association. All rights reserved.DOI:10.1111/aeq.12005

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well-respected young man from a white middle-class family. Colleagues and supervisorssaw him as fair, well organized, and capable. They believed he was a rising star destinedto move into school administration. Roger shared their views, describing himself as “fair

and just to all my pupils” and “playing no favorites” (Spindler and Spindler 1982:25).Using multiple research methods, including participate observation, rating scales,surveys, and interviews, Spindler came to a different perception of Roger. Despite his

belief that he was fair, Spindler found that Roger was fair to only 40 percent of theclass—those students most like him: white, achievement oriented, and middle class(McDermott and Erickson 2000). He also favored female over male students, which Spin-dler attributed to Roger’s alienation from his father. He consistently rated these studentshigher than the Mexican-American and Portuguese immigrant students on surveys of academic promise and social interactions; he spent more time with them in class, and hedemanded more from them than he did of the other students.

Surveys and interviews with students offered another perspective of Roger and the

classroom in which he taught. When students described the social network in their class-room and their impression of their teacher, they gave positive ratings to peers whomRoger perceived as isolated and uninvolved, and they considered many of the studentsfavored by the teacher as marginal. They also did not share the perception of Roger’scolleagues and supervisors that he was fair; they believed that he was unfair to somestudents and definitely had favorites. George and Louise Spindler, writing in 1982, 30years later, concluded:

This young man, with the best of intentions, was confirming the negative hypotheses and predic-tions (as well as the positive ones) already made within the social system. He was informing Anglomiddle-class children that they were capable, had bright futures, were socially acceptable, and

were worth a lot of trouble. He was also informing lower-class and non-Anglo children that theywere less capable, less socially acceptable, less worth the trouble. He was defeating his owndeclared educational goals. [1982:26]

Concepts of Self and Identity

These perception gaps concerned George Spindler because he saw the classroom as avenue for children’s construction of self. Spindler was influenced by the work of CharlesHorton Cooley (1902) and George Herbert Mead (1934) who proposed that self is sociallyconstructed, and that we form a sense of who we are through the reactions of others,especially significant others such as teachers. If self is socially constructed, classroom

interactions become especially important for students because so much of their socialinteraction is in classrooms. Classroom interactions are also important for teachers becauseit is in the classroom that their sense of self as a professional develops. George and LouiseSpindler provide an important distinction between the enduring self, the situated self, andthe endangered self. They describe the enduring self as “that sense of continuity one haswith one’s own past—a personal continuity of experience, meaning, and social identity”(Hallowell 1955 in Spindler and Spindler 1993:375). The situated self encompasses “thoseaspects of the person required to cope with the everyday exigencies of life. This self issituated and contextualized” (1993:375). The Spindlers go on to explain that the situatedself is instrumental in that self-efficacy is tied to success or failure while the enduring self provides stability and continuity with the past. The enduring self is important to theSpindlers because with it “any given student or teacher will have a sense of self that isrelatively independent of the situation one finds oneself in” (1993:376).

Students and teachers create a “situated self” in each classroom they enter. RogerHarker likely felt little dissonance between his situated self as a teacher and his enduringself as a white middle-class man because his expectations for appropriate classroom

Finnan Self and Other 95



interactions mirrored societal views of “normal” and “proper” behavior. In his classroom,most of the white, middle-class, achievement-oriented female students had little disso-nance between their situated and enduring selves. Their experiences outside the class-

room, the meaning they gave to experiences, and their social identity were valued and built upon in Roger’s classroom. In contrast, the other students also created a situated self but one that probably differed from their enduring self and one that was not valued byRoger Harker. Not sharing experiences, values, language, and cultural/social identitywith Roger, their efforts to fit into his perception of a good student fell short. The Spindlersconcluded that if the enduring self is violated too often or too severely in an effort to forma situated self, the self may become an endangered self : “This . . . certainly occurs as childrenand youth of diverse cultural origins confront school cultures that are antagonistic to thepremises and behavioral patterns of their own culture” (1993:376).

The focus on self, enduring, situated, and endangered, has run a distant second in theeducational literature to a focus on identity. Anthropologists have been instrumental in

turning a research spotlight on how racial and ethnic identity is enacted in schools andclassrooms. Much work, especially that influenced by John Ogbu, emphasizes students’oppositional or conformist identities (Fordham 1988; Ogbu 1978). This body of work treatsidentity as rather fixed and leaves little room for variation within groups and withinindividuals (Gibson 1988; Hemmings 2000; Hoffman 1998). It does, however, highlight theracialized society in which we live and that ethnic and racial identities are as often placedon students as assumed by them (e.g., Ladson-Billings and Tate 1995; Monzó and Rueda2009).

Other anthropological research, focusing primarily on race, class, and gender, portraysidentity in a more fluid manner. One line of research emphasizes the “boundary work”needed to maintain multiple identities (e.g., Hemmings 2000; Phelan et al. 1998). Thisresearch examines how students adopt different identities to cross boundaries betweenhome, peers, and school. Other research, rooted in the work of Vygotsky (1978) andBakhtin (1981), emphasizes student agency in navigating multiple and changing identitiesthat are shaped by cultural forces and by students’ internal “improvisions” and dialogues(e.g., Holland et al. 1998; Monzó and Rueda 2009; Schaffer and Skinner 2009).

Diane Hoffman returns to the Spindlers’ focus on self and questions educational anthro-pologists’ focus on identity, calling for a better understanding of “self-other relatedness”(1998:326). She expresses concern that we make educational decisions based on a superficialunderstanding of how identities are created. According to Hoffman, we need to focus on theconcept of self rather than identity because, “It is not reducible to the roles it plays, the

groups it ‘belongs’ to, or to theidentities it negotiates; it points, in sum, to something beyondidentity” (1998:328). Hoffman describes the role of education in shaping students’ sense of self by asserting that education “shapes identity by shaping the patterns of self’s relations toothers, the expectations that exist for conformity between ‘situated’ and ‘enduring’ selves,and patterns of orientation to change. It is, at heart, a pedagogy of selfhood—a mirror for aswell as a model of culturally envisioned self” (1998:334).

Aspects of Self: Sense of Accomplishment, Belonging, and Engagement

I first heard the Roger Harker story as a Stanford graduate student in the late 1970s andalways wondered what Roger Harker thought made white, middle-class, achievement-oriented, female students superior to their peers. I suggest that Roger thought that thesestudents had more potential or capacity to accomplish great things, belong in and con-tribute to society, and engage in tasks requiring a serious personal investment. In otherwords, he perceived these students to have a higher capacity for accomplishment, belong-ing, and engagement than their peers. I hold that our sense of accomplishment, belonging,

96 Anthropology & Education Quarterly Volume 44, 2013



and engagement are critical aspects of our sense of self. All three manifest themselves inour enduring and situated selves and are heavily influenced by the social context.

This focus on accomplishment, belonging, and engagement as key components of self

grew out of research, literature reviews, and conversations with colleagues on the inter-section of school and classroom context with students’ and teachers’ sense of self. Ithought that it was important to specify the aspects of self that lead to success in school. AsI examined research and reflected on my experiences in classrooms, I saw that for somestudents the classroom experience confirms or builds their belief that they are capable of accomplishing challenging tasks, contributing to and being part of a group, and engagingin meaningful activities, while the classroom experience teaches other students a morediscouraging lesson (Finnan 2009; Finnan and Kombe 2011). As I continue to work withthis framework I realize that to truly understand the effect of the classroom context onstudents, we also need to examine its effect on teachers’ sense of self. As students look totheir teacher for confirmation of their sense of self, teachers look to their students for

confirmation of their teaching effectiveness.As a component of self, a sense of accomplishment describes our confidence in our

ability to do what is culturally required and valued. We have all experienced a sense of accomplishment, whether by capturing the essence of the subject in a painting, making thegame-winning point in basketball, or participating in a meaningful conversation inanother language. As teachers, we gain a sense of accomplishment when we “see the lightgo on” in students’ eyes or receive a note of thanks from a former student. A sense of accomplishment is at its most intense when we succeed at something we find challenging.This usually involves persisting at tasks that we were not sure we could successfullymaster. A sense of accomplishment requires “instrumental competence,” the culturalunderstanding of how to perform the activities that are tied to acquisition of possessions,recognition, power, status, or satisfaction (Spindler and Spindler 1989). The task must also

be deemed “challenging” within the social and cultural context. For example, if a teachertells the class a math activity is easy, students who struggle to complete it will notexperience a sense of accomplishment even though it was challenging for them. A sense of accomplishment also requires confidence, what Alfred Bandura describes as self-efficacy,the belief in one’s capacity to accomplish tasks (1977). We experience a sense of accom-plishment most intensely when successful completion of a task confirms our competenceand builds confidence that had previously been tentative. A sense of accomplishment isnot synonymous with academic achievement, because people of all ability levels vary intheir sense of accomplishment; many highly gifted people lack a sense of accomplishment

because tasks are too easy.A sense of belonging, another critical dimension of self, describes our confidence in

ourselves as social beings and in our ability to make and contribute to relationships withothers. In Maslow’s “hierarchy of needs,” belonging is next in importance after physi-ological and safety needs (1943). It is typically seen as an aspect of identity, as in belongingas a member of a group. It invokes questions about place (e.g., Do I belong in this place?Who controls this place?) (Erickson and Mohatt 1982); of inclusion and exclusion or “usversus them” (e.g., If I belong in this group, can I also belong in other groups and who elsecan belong in this group?) (Warriner 2007), and the power and politics underlying deter-minations of the cultural knowledge and behaviors needed to belong (e.g., What do groupmembers need to know and be able to do to be treated as members of the group?). Thesequestions arise for both students and teachers.

In most American classrooms, belonging typically calls for assimilation to middle-class,white expectations (Suarez-Orozco 1987; Hemmings 2000; Ladson-Billings and Tate 1995);for many students, this requires the creation of a classroom-situated self that is appropriatefor these expectations but that differs from the enduring self. Where a sense of belonging




is fostered in classrooms, differences between the enduring self and situated self are notlarge and are never problematic; all students are accepted for who they are, are needed forwhat they can contribute, and are encouraged to contribute diverse ideas and ways of

thinking.A sense of engagement is another key dimension of self that helps us believe that wecan do and enjoy the things that are valued in society. While a sense of accomplishment isoriented toward an outcome, a sense of engagement is oriented toward the act of doing orlearning. A sense of engagement exists within Vygotsky’s zone of proximal development(ZPD; 1978) and resembles Csikszentmihalyi’s flow (1997, 2000). Within the ZDP, a state of engagement, or flow, involves doing something that challenges, pushes, or stretches theperson. Like accomplishment, engagement necessitates balancing competence and chal-lenge, but with a sense of engagement we believe that we will enjoy the experience of challenging ourselves. We focus less on the outcome and more on the process. A sense of engagement involves positive emotions of “enthusiasm, optimism, curiosity, and interest”

(Skinner and Belmont 1993:572). These same qualities describe teachers’ engagement inthe content and process of teaching (Staton and Hunt 1992). For students to develop asense of engagement, they need more than interest and minimal competence in the task orsubject; they also need the “interactional competence” to be able to communicate andinterpret in culturally appropriate ways (Erickson 1997; Mehan 1980). They need to makesense of the task and see its value in their lives. To develop a sense of engagement inclassroom activities, students need to read the teacher’s cultural messages and displayculturally appropriate responses.

In summary, these dimensions of self, accomplishment, belonging, and engagement,help to operationalize how we conceptualize self within a social and academic context andprovide a vehicle for better understanding the interconnections between teachers’ andstudents’ sense of self. They help to clarify how we define ourselves and how othersperceive us. Although Spindler did not explicitly examine differences between Roger andhis students in terms of their perceived capacity for accomplishment, belonging, and,engagement, he did find that Roger and the children had very different views of who was“liked or disliked and by whom, who was ‘respected,’ who was maladjusted, who wassucceeding and who wasn’t, who was known for being fun, hardworking, or mean, etc.”(Spindler and Spindler 1982:30).

Self-Other Perception Sixty Years Later

Given the changes in schools and society since the 1950s the Roger Harker story shouldseem like a quaint reminder of a time when white, middle-class, male superiority wasunquestioned by most of the mainstream. With Brown v. Board of Education; the CivilRights Movement; and efforts to celebrate cultural, linguistic, and gender differences, andto train and support reflective practitioners, we should no longer see the biases Rogerdisplayed. However, decades of subsequent research document the resilience of thedynamic played out in Roger Harker’s classroom (e.g., Ferguson 2001; Fine 1991; Lareau2003; McDermott 1987; Ogbu 1978; Schaffer and Skinner 2009; Suarez-Orozco 1987). Toooften, whether knowingly or unknowingly, teachers favor students more like themselvesand misread the assumptions, actions, and aspirations of students who are different.Efforts to close the achievement gap, most notably through provisions in the No Child LeftBehind Act, that draw attention to student performance by race, socioeconomic status,language, and disability only exacerbate this tendency.

I was drawn back to the Roger Harker story when I began analyzing some data Icollected in four Title I elementary schools.1 I have worked with these schools for manyyears in different capacities. I know that most of the teachers are committed to improving




the life chances for all of their students, but they are frustrated that their students fail tomake the progress demanded by our accountability age. As part of a larger researchproject, I began examining classroom environments to see if the classrooms encourage

students to develop a positive sense of accomplishment, belonging, and engagement. Aspart of this examination I asked third through fifth grade teachers to rate each of theirstudents on several dimensions of accomplishment (welcomes challenges, takes respon-sibility for actions), belonging (maintains positive social relationships, displays respectful

behavior), and engagement (actively participates, is motivated and interested) and askedstudents to rate themselves on similar dimensions. I wanted to see how teachers’ percep-tions of students compared to students’ self-perceptions. Not surprisingly, students’ self-ratings were higher than teacher ratings on most dimensions.

To examine the Roger Harker phenomena, I disaggregated students’ self-ratings andteachers’ rating of students by students’ gender, race/ethnicity, free/reduced price lunch,and reading ability (as measured by the Measures of Academic Progress test). Teachers

consistently rated certain groups of students (those eligible for free/reduced price lunch, blacks, boys, and struggling readers) lower than their counterparts (students paying forlunch, white/Hispanic students, girls, and average/high readers). In contrast, the studentself-ratings showed little difference across demographic groups. In other words, teachersindicated that certain groups of students were less likely than their counterparts towelcome challenges, take responsibility for their actions, develop positive social relation-ships, display respectful behavior, participate actively in class, and exhibit motivation andinterest in learning. These findings are quite similar to what George Spindler found withRoger Harker.

An interesting finding from my research adds a new wrinkle to the Roger Harker storyand has led me to want to look more closely at the interconnections between students’ andteachers’ sense of self within the classroom. Although my findings look very similar toSpindler’s, I can see something Spindler could not by disaggregating teacher and studentresponses by demographic groups. In doing this, I found that the group of students thatteachers overwhelmingly see as least apt to demonstrate accomplishment, belonging, andengagement are the students falling into the lowest group of readers. Teachers rated thevast majority of struggling readers (those falling into the lowest group) considerably lowerthan their peers on all dimensions: welcoming challenges, being responsible for theiractions, having positive social relationships, displaying respectful behavior, actively par-ticipating in class, and being motivated and interested in learning. In contrast, there is littledifference in how struggling readers and more proficient readers rated themselves; from

a student perspective, reading proficiency has little effect on perceptions of accomplish-ment, belonging, and engagement. Why do teachers view struggling readers’ capabilityacross all of these dimensions so negatively? I posit that teachers’ sense of self is alsosupported or challenged within the classroom and that, in an age of accountability forstudent learning, teachers are likely to perceive struggling readers more negatively thanother groups of students. It is difficult for teachers to feel a sense of accomplishment whentheir students continue to struggle to read; out of frustration with themselves, the stu-dents, or accountability demands, they attribute negative characteristics to those studentswho challenge their sense of effectiveness as teachers.

ConclusionSixty years ago George and Louise Spindler initiated a strand of anthropological

research on the effect of teacher perceptions on children. This focus remains as importanttoday as it was when George Spindler worked with Roger Harker to examine his percep-tions and address the damage they inflicted on many of his students. Although many of




us have worked with teachers to understand themselves as culture-bearers (Scram 1994),the disconnect between teachers and students remains a serious problem in our schoolsand in our wider society. Over six decades of research exposes aspects of our society that

most white, middle-class, educated people do not want to acknowledge: we all make judgments of ourselves and others based on deeply held attitudes and assumptionsusually based on indicators of gender, race or ethnicity, social class, and education level(Hill 2008). Many of us present our research findings to teachers who participated in ourresearch, to preservice teachers in our education classes, and in meetings of teachers andprincipals. Typically, they are appalled and uncomfortable with the findings. They do notlike to see themselves as unfair and biased.

Essentially, teachers today are much like Roger Harker was in the 1950s; they want to believe they are unbiased and fair, but they make judgments of children based on cultur-ally formed perceptions. In addition, I suggest that their views of students are influenced

by their own need to see themselves as effective teachers. Their sense of self, both enduring

and situated, is also influenced by dynamics in the classroom. This was undoubtedly trueof Roger Harker as well, but it is more problematic today as teachers are bombarded bydata and are held accountable for, and potentially compensated based on, students’ per-formance on high-stakes tests. It is not surprising that their perceptions of students arecolored by the students’ academic performance.

George and Louise Spindler moved beyond researching the self-other relationship inschools and developed strategies they described as “cultural therapy” (Spindler andSpindler 1994). George Spindler’s first attempt at cultural therapy was when he presentedhis findings to Roger Harker; he turned Roger’s initial denial and anger into a therapeuticopportunity. Through cultural therapy, Spindler was able to help Roger better understandhis cultural biases and work more effectively with all children. George and Louise Spin-dler continued to develop cultural therapy throughout their careers, but they recognizedthat it has limitations because it only works when “patients” seek therapy and are willingto carefully examine the gender, cultural, class, and achievement-oriented biases they

bring to interactions with children (1994). Given the scale and persistence of perceptiongaps, we need to create processes similar to cultural therapy that can be taken to scale in

both the training of future teachers and professional development of current teachers.These processes need to address perception gaps between teachers and students byrecognizing the interplay and interdependence within a classroom of teachers’ and stu-dents’ sense of self.

George and Louise Spindler encouraged many educational anthropologists to examine

school and classroom effects on a student’s situated and enduring self. My work builds onthis tradition, focusing on the dynamic that occurs in teachers’ classrooms that encouragethe development of a positive sense of accomplishment, belonging, and engagement.Students look to their teachers for reassurance that they are capable of mastering therequired curriculum, that they belong in and contribute to the classroom community, andthat they have the capacity to fully engage in demanding lessons. Without meaning to, toomany teachers send a message to some of their students that they doubt their ability to doso. This is understandable in the current climate of high-stakes testing and accountability.Struggling students challenge teachers’ sense of accomplishment and engagement. Out of frustration, by orders from administrators, or because of self-doubt, many teachers arereluctant to take time to build the relationships with students that ultimately will support

both students’ and teachers’ positive sense of self.As educational anthropologists we have an obligation to stand up for students who are

negatively affected by current policies and practices and for teachers who struggle todevelop and retain a sense of professional pride (McDermott 2007; Sloan 2007). The focuson accountability and testing has made all schools, but especially schools serving our most




vulnerable students, unlikely places to foster a positive, enduring self in too many stu-dents and teachers. Students are constantly tested and drilled in a narrow curriculum andare reminded of their academic weaknesses. Teachers are under pressure to show results

and to ensure that all of their students meet goals that for many are unrealistic. Thispressure on teachers has a profound effect on how teachers perceive their strugglingstudents, themselves, and the content they teach (McDermott 2007; Sloan 2007). Addi-tional research focused on how teachers develop a sense of professionalism as part of areciprocal exchange with students is needed to better understand this process. It is impor-tant for us to turn our eyes and anthropological sensibilities toward examining the unan-ticipated consequences of policies on teachers and students. Anthropological research canhave a profound effect on our understanding of school and classroom dynamics as GeorgeSpindler’s Roger Harker story exemplifies. It is a story of only one teacher and oneclassroom, but it illustrates the power of a story well researched and well told. Multiplestories of multiple teachers and classrooms will add depth to the educational debate.

Christine Finnan is a professor with a joint appointment in the Sociology and Anthro-pology Department and Teacher Education Department at the College of Charleston inCharleston, South Carolina.

Notes

Acknowledgements. I want to thank George Spindler for his mentorship and friendship and for hisprofound influence on our field. This paper is in honor of the 60th anniversary of his Roger Harkerstory. I also extend thanks to Lorin W. Anderson for highlighting the importance of accomplishment,

belonging, and engagement as components of self and to the journal’s anonymous reviewers for theirhelpful comments.1. Thirty teachers and 288 students participated in the study. The teacher demographics are

93 percent female; 83 percent white, 10 percent black, and 6 percent Hispanic. The studentdemographics are 50 percent female; 64 percent black, 8 percent white, and 8 percent Hispanic; 84percent eligible for free/reduced price lunch. On a test of reading ability (Measures of AcademicProgress—MAP), 37 percent of the students scored in the lowest third, 35 percent in the middle third,and 27 percent in the highest third compared to a national database of test takers.

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Documents

Perceptions of self and other in the elementary classroom - From George Spindler's 'Roger Harker Story' to today's classrooms - 9361976294088171127.pdf