The Physical Performance of the Teacher and the Masks of Resistance: An Ethnographic Approach to the Classroom Experience

Abstract

The teacher’s performance, from a pedagogical perspective, is linked to educational tasks carried out within the classroom community. These tasks are defined by pre-established contracts based on the state’s institutional strategies and its perception of the concepts of the teacher and the learner. However, the process of the classroom experience does not unfold automatically ; instead, it is shaped by emotional and physical interactions that oscillate between admiration and violence, proximity and distance, and comedy and tragic acts. This paradox leads us to explore the performances of the teacher’s body, and its masks as forms of resistance within the educational experience. The teacher expresses awareness or lack thereof through actions of silence and speech, movement and stillness, and employs multiple masks in various situations and roles they embody or attempt to embody. Additionally, the teacher becomes the subject of observation for the learners, and their performance is determined by their interaction with them.

In this context, an ethnographic approach is employed to extract the statements of the teacher’s body within the secondary education experience in Moroccan schools. This is done in light of a theoretical sensitivity derived from studies on educational observation, encompassing the concepts of theatricality and performativity. It sheds light on the theatricality of the body in relation to the researched sample of teachers and their performance in relation to the learners, based on three ideal-type models : the authoritarian body that seeks to establish the formal authority of the teacher in the classroom, the emotional body that reflects the teacher’s self and emotional integration within the experience, and the aesthetic body through which the teacher orchestrates their authoritative and emotional masks.