Powerful teaching, the paradox of empowerment and the powers of Foucault. An interview with Professor Stephen Brookfield
Why this work is in the frame
A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This interview follows up on a previous interview with Stephen Brookfield in the Journal of Applied Learning & Teaching (Brookfield et al., 2019). It was conducted as part of an ongoing book project with the working title Teaching well that the authors are involved in. This interview may be seen as a teaser for the book that is planned to be published in 2023. It constitutes an extended version of one out of 13 planned chapters and focuses on how power shows up in higher education classrooms. Classrooms are never power-free zones. Every learning environment contains student-to-student and student-to-teacher power dynamics. We discuss various influences on Stephen Brookfield’s conceptual understanding of power, especially Michel Foucault’s concepts of sovereign, disciplinary and bio-power and their applicability to education. In this context, we explore similarities between prisons and schools, the metaphor of the panopticon, and the continued relevance of bio-power during the current pandemic. The democratic practice of discussion groups is questioned (despite Stephen Brookfield’s personal preference of that modality) and the lecture is reinstated as one of several useful modalities. We then arrive at Brookfield’s concept of powerful teaching & learning and how teachers can exercise their power in ethical, productive and responsible ways. The interview ends with Brookfield’s advice on institutional criticism. Since beginning his teaching career in 1970, Stephen Brookfield has worked in England, Canada, Australia, and the U.S., teaching in a variety of adult, community, organisational and higher education settings (the latter include Harvard University and Columbia University). In his endeavour to help adults learn to think critically about the dominant ideologies they have internalised, Professor Brookfield has written, co-written or edited 20 books on adult learning and teaching, critical thinking, discussion methods, critical theory and teaching race.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.007 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it