| This executive position paper seeks to detail the ways power is exercised in extraclassroom settings at Pequea Valley Intermediate School. The goal of this study is to recommend practices and policies that both empower marginalized students and eliminate practices that characterize chronic delinquency amongst students.; Too many students commit repeated acts of misconduct at Pequea Valley Intermediate School and experience negative academic and social outcomes. Student-to-student exercises of power serve to rank, empower, and subordinate students, with some students demonstrating chronic delinquent behavior. Examining the exercise of power on a microlevel will enable administrators and teachers to recognize and better support an empowering and participatory education for marginalized students.; This qualitative study involved 53 field notes recorded in three extraclassroom sites at Pequea Valley Intermediate School: the cafeteria, the hallways, and the assistant principal's office. These observations yielded 479 exercises of disciplinary power that were subsequently coded into a priori coding categories derived from Michel Foucault's conceptions of disciplinary power. Seventeen students participated in semi-structured interviews designed to offer depth of information regarding the exercise of disciplinary power in these settings.; Field research revealed that power functioned in multiple and divergent ways. Students adhered to varied sets of normalized behaviors that were highly contextualized. Norms of behavior were continuously defined and rewritten, influenced greatly by the presence or absence of adult and peer surveillance. Furthermore, students demonstrated continual classification and reclassification of their peers based upon fluid and vague criteria. Behavior within peers groups was consistently normalized by its members; often, peer groups participated in the normalization of behaviors that excluded others and served to continually fix deviant status on these excluded students.; Recommendations included encouraging teachers and administrators to adopt an analytic informed by power as a productive force regarding program implementation and evaluation, facilitating students' recognition of disciplinary power, disrupting student and teacher practices that contribute to the fixation of deviancy, and interrogating teacher/administrator regulatory behaviors. |
