JOURNEY COMPANIONS: LITERATURE REVIEW AND THEORETICAL IDEAS
3.8 Theoretical ideas and the teaching of controversial issues
3.8.1 Strengths and limitations of the positioning theory for my study
The positioning theory was conceived to analyse social interactions between persons. The use of positioning theory finds out explanations of what actors are doing, how they do it, and the social consequences of their actions. The theory focuses on the discourse between persons because meanings are created by people in the discourse. Thus the study of meaning is the ontological aim of the positioning
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theory by looking at speech acts, positions and storylines. In a conversation,
“positioning can be understood as the discursive construction of personal stories that make a person’s acts intelligible and relatively determinate as social acts and within the members of the conversation have specific locations” (Harré & van Langenhove, 1999, p.395; 217).
Actors’ acts are supported by illocutionary forces or by perlocutionary forces. The illocutionary forces of an utterance are related to the actor’s intention in producing that utterance whereas the perlocutionary force is a speech considered at the level of its psychological consequences, such as persuading or convincing. The following triangle depicts continuous interaction between the storyline, social act and position.
The storyline refers to the discursive contexts in which an action is interpreted, whereas the act is what is accomplished socially through a particular action. It can be linguistically or non-linguistically constituted.
Figure 3.1: The building blocks of meaning (Harré & van Langenhove, 1999 as quoted by Schmidle, 2010)
The positioning theory focuses on the phenomenon of one’s position, who constructs it, and whether or not it is accepted. The following quote from Dennen explains the value of positioning theory in this regard:
Positioning theory may help explain why facilitator presence develops in certain ways (i.e., why one facilitator is considered more involved or engaged than another even if their participation levels are equal). The notion of presence, then, becomes not only a matter of how a facilitator positions herself, but also of how learners position her and of how she
Positions
Social acts/forces Storyline
Soc
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accepts the positions they ascribe to her. For example, a learner may expect validation of her contributions to the course discussion in the form of a facilitator reply, or she may assume the professor will have minimal presence in the discussion, leaving it as a student interaction space. In the former example, the learner may interpret a non-present facilitator as an absent and uncaring one, whereas in the latter the learner may interpret a highly present facilitator as overbearing and controlling. Thus, should the learner’s expectations and facilitator’s actions not match up, some form of presence negotiation will be necessary to resolve the breech (Dennen, 2006, p. 268).
The value or purpose of positioning theory is thus that it “is concerned with revealing the explicit and implicit patterns of reasoning that are realised in the ways that people act towards others” (Harré et al., 2009, p. 5). Therefore, in the teaching of the Genocide and its related controversial issues, the teacher presence develops in various ways. She or he can be committed and engage in learners’ discussion with scholarly researched explanations. Another option the teacher can adopt is to have less involvement in learners’ discussion. In this process, learners have their own way of attributing some positions to their teacher. The positioning theory can help to understand why the teacher is acting in a given way. In other words, the context or storyline in which the teacher is operating can help to understand different positions taken by the teacher in interactions with the learners.
Positioning theory also serves to look at how rights and duties are attributed to and by individuals and the reasons of ascription of duties (Schmidle, 2010). Baert (2012) notes that “contrary to explanations of social behaviour in terms of rules or roles, positioning theory acknowledges people’s ability to actively engage in and change position within ongoing conversations whereas the notions of rules and roles denote stability, the concept of positioning catches the continuous shifts in how people perceive themselves and how others perceive them (van Langenhove & Harré, 1999a)” (p.310). Therefore, positioning theory bridged role theory.
With reference to the above discussion about role and position, the term ‘teacher role’ is commonly used among educational researchers and practitioners to describe how teachers respond to various demands and situations (Hanghøj & Brund, 2011).
Even if role and position may be used interchangeably, in positioning theory roles and positions are quite different (Dennen, 2007). In contexts such as education,
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roles are a core part of one’s identity and tend to define social practices, responsibilities and expectations. But, positions can be viewed in light of roles, or rather roles as the anchor points of positions. Positions are more fluid than roles and can therefore change with each act. For instance, throughout a course, a teacher may hold a dominant or receding position in each particular act or discourse. A teacher may take an authoritative position while dealing with an administrative matter, but take a less dominant position while using a learner centred approach (Dennen, 2007). Therefore Harré and van Langenhove (1991) found that the term position is more appropriate than role in engaging with social phenomena.
With reference to positioning theory, some authors (Dennen, 2006; Richtie & Rigano, 2001) note that discussants have different responsibilities and expectations based on the positions that they occupy within a given storyline as are noted by their words and interactions. One may position oneself (reflexive positioning), or be situated by others (interactive positioning). This reflexive positioning is referred to by Harré and van Langenhove (1991) as second order positioning. It means that by reflexive positioning, a person who is told something questions it. For instance, if Peter asks John to wash his car, Peter can question why to wash it, if he is not his domestic worker. Therefore, positioning involves an “agent” and a “positioned party” (Baert, 2012). The agent, who can be one person or a group, is the one doing the positioning and the positioned party is attributed certain characteristics.
Within other positions mentioned by Harré and van Langenhove (1999) include for instance, the self and others positioning; the tacit and intentional positioning; the moral and personal positioning. For this moral positioning, if John asks Peter to buy him food, it can be understood if Peter is John’s son. The latter has a moral obligation to do it. Thus the moral positioning is explained by taking into account the roles people occupy within a given context of social life. Similarly, positioning involves what Harré et al. (2009) call prepositioning. It is a positioning act to assign or delete duties and rights. For instance, to say to someone: “You don’t have the right to…” or “It is in your duties to…” and so on” (Harré et al., 2009, p.9).
Considering what the teacher teaches and the way she/he does it, the learners can position her/him in a certain way. The given position is not static, it keeps changing through the interaction with learners and due not only to the content offered but also
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due to the context and the learners’ identities. By prepositioning, the teacher can also advise the learners what they should or not do during the teaching of the Genocide and its related controversial issues.
Alongside moral positioning, identity and self-positioning are highly interrelated and in turn impact on how an individual accepts positioning and categorization by others (Dennen, 2006; Harré & Maghaddan, 2003). For instance, learners expect to interact with the teacher not only due to her/his duties but also due to other categorisation such as gender, age or stereotypes. In social constructivist settings learners may initially look to their teachers to be the font of objective truths, but teachers may respond to such positioning by declaring their own positions as not being experts, but merely more experienced co-learners. In an educational context, issues of identity are tied closely to knowledge (who is correct?) and power (who is in charge?). These questions impact on interactions (Dennen, 2006). Thus, positioning theory may help to analyse how teachers react on learners’ prior knowledge and to understand if teachers position themselves as co-learners or people in charge of transmitting the truth. In addition, the positioning theory can help to see if teachers themselves take into consideration learners’ identities when they are teaching the Genocide and its related controversial issues. For instance, due to empathy, the teacher can be influenced by the sorrow of learners who survived a conflict and change her or his teaching approaches and strategies accordingly (McAllister &
Irvine, 2002). In this regard Dennen (2007) argues that positioning depends on context. Do partaking teachers in this research take different positions in front of a class mainly composed of Genocide survivors and in a class dominated by mature learners?
Another motivation to use the positioning theory is that the Genocide is a sensitive issue. Positioning research has over time shifted from rights and duties to focus more on a type of moral imperative. Therefore, there are supererogatory duties and supererogatory rights in positioning theory. Supererogatory duties are those tasks that “individuals and groups are not obliged to carry out but get credit when they do perform them” (Harré et al., 2009, p. 28). For instance, when a learner is traumatised and falls down in the school, the teacher is obligated to aid. But, the teacher can be rewarded if she/he saves the children from pain. The second kind of duties is
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supererogatory rights. Supererogatory rights are thus those rights someone can restrain from using after noticing that it can be inappropriate to use those rights.
Thus, the person can be rewarded for not using those rights (Harré et al., 2009). For example, a teacher has the right to talk about rape during the Genocide against the Tutsi, but he can decide to decline that right because it would cause pain to learners from families who experienced such problems. Thus, positioning theory “looks at what a person may do and may not do” (Harré et al., 2009, p. 9). Thus, in teaching the Genocide and its related controversial issues what are teachers doing and what are they avoiding?
Due to the reflexive positioning and the interactive positioning, I decided to use the positioning theory to analyse the Rwandan secondary school history teachers’
experiences of teaching the Genocide and its related controversial issues in the Rwandan context. How do teachers position themselves? Why do they position themselves the way they do? Is it due to the context they are working in or are there other factors? As Boston (2015) posits “positioning is an interactive concept that accounts for contradictions, incompatible realities and rapid shifts of meaning and relationships between participants” (Boston, 2015, p.135). In teaching the Genocide and its related controversial issues, the teacher and the learners are in conversation within particular discourses and everyone has rights and responsibilities. Thus in the conversation, the teacher can be positioned by learners and the learners can be positioned by the teacher due to the context. The exchange between teacher and learners “may be characterised by the joint construction of meaning and action, confusion or conflict” (Boston, 2015, p.135). The positioning theory can help me to see if teachers and learners work collaboratively to understand the Genocide against the Tutsi and which topics brings confusion or conflict.
Regarding, the positioning theory limitations, it is challenging for an outsider to understand the teacher’s positionality if the outsider does not know the Rwandan context because “the meaning and structure of private discourse has to be looked at within a cultural context, and in relation to the larger normative system in which a person lives” (Harré et al., 2009, p.26). Thus an in-depth analysis of the Rwandan socio-political institutions and milieu in which the teacher is operating and the context learners are in are necessary for a better use of the positioning theory (Baert, 2012).
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In my case, the Rwandan historical background and current situation have been explained so that I can better understand why teachers are positioned the way they are. In addition, in the sixth chapter, the school context in which the participants work is also described. However, Slocum and van Langenhove (2004) do not attribute major importance to the actors’ geographical and temporal place. Slocum and van Langenhove (2004) note that personal beliefs about people engaged in a conversation are key aspects to understand what has been said. The ignorance of space and time even contradict the importance of the role of context in positioning theory. Another weakness of positioning theory is its fluidity and lack of giving clearly different positions a teacher can adopt when teaching controversial issues in a post- conflict situation. In the literature, it was explained that some teachers omit controversial issues (Buhigiro, 2012; The Historical Association, 2007). However, various approaches and strategies of teaching genocides and controversial issues including whole school curricula, use of resource persons and museums, teacher centredness or learner centred approach through discussion are highlighted (Avraham, 2010; Burtonwood, 2002; Desiatov, 2016; Glanz, 1999; Lawrence, 2012;
Lindquist, 2006; McCully, 2006; Totten, 2000).
The literature is vague about a clear typology of positions the teacher can adopt to teach the Genocide against the Tutsi and its related controversial issues. Positions proposed by Hanghøj and Brund (2011) in their study where teachers can be positioned as instructor, playmaker, guide and explorer are related to teachers’
positions in educational games not in the post-conflict situation. In this way, it can be difficult to analyse teachers’ positions while teaching the Genocide against the Tutsi and its related controversial issues in post-Genocide Rwanda. Conversely, all mentioned positions in the literature including the self-positioning (Harré & van Langenhove, 1999) do not refer to a psychological preparation the teacher can do before teaching the Genocide.
Some limitations of the positioning theory were mediated by looking at various authors who proposed specific positions teachers can adopt when teaching controversial issues. For instance, Stradling (1984) proposed a typology of teaching controversial issues in the context of Northern Ireland. Northern Ireland is considered in this study as a post-conflict society. As Rwanda also experiences a war (1990-
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1994) and the Genocide in 1994, it is interesting to use this theoretical framework to analyse the Rwandan case. However, I do not affirm that all post-conflict societies are alike. The analysis will see if there are similarities or differences between the Rwandan case and those proposed by Stradling (1984) and other scholars.