4 Quadrants of Teaching

The Effective Application of Pedagogy and Power

The Pedagogy Axis

This axis has an opinion. Care is better than Compliance. The simplest definition for the purpose of education is to nurture student agency. The purpose of education is to give students practice, feedback and opportunity for reflection on their decisions. This requires caretaking in support of risk taking. This is the opposite of demanding compliance.

The Power Axis

This axis assumes a progression, a movement from a teacher wielding majority Positional Power to majority Relational Power as the student gets older. Positional power will always have a positive role to play. Good teachers will use their positional power well. Bad teachers will abuse their positional power. Relational power can, of course, also be abused. Good teachers are important.

The Privilege Quadrant

This quadrant is characterized by collusion. The teacher is allowed to lift the curtain and give the student access to the skills and information necessary to understand that the wizard is naked. The student understands that they can exploit this information to situate themselves in a financially comfortable life. It is also possible that the student could try to exploit this information to achieve liberatory ends but that would risk their privileged position.

The Dependence Quadrant

This is the craven corner. This is the place where teachers complain that students behave poorly and won’t do what they are told. This is the quadrant where students are only given the opportunity to survive. This is the default form of education in America. This quadrant is characterized by what Bettina L. Love calls the Educational Survival Complex which demands a student’s ongoing dependence on and fealty to an unjust system that is not built for their benefit.

The Trust Quadrant

Trust goes both ways and requires both the teacher and the student to believe they are headed in the right direction, towards the student’s agency. This can be difficult for a teacher who sees a student making bad decisions that they want to correct and this can be difficult for students when they are required to make decisions that involve compromise. This quadrant is characterized by a reconciliation of the student’s lived experiences with the often harsh and often unjust realities of education as gauntlet.

The Independence Quadrant

Zaretta Hammond advocates for “culturally responsive teaching as a method for honing cognitive capacity in students and supporting independent learning and agency.” Paolo Friere convinces us that through dialogue we can make and remake the world, that teaching is praxis. This quadrant is characterized by liberation from oppressive structures that limit students. Liberation that enables students to see limits as difficulties they can overcome and not as barriers. Students learn to become independent by practicing independence. Once independent, a student can choose to be interdependent. Without independence, interdependence is just dependence.