Gender Roles In The Classroom

Imagine if you will, a classroom, it could be modern or traditional, there may be some desks with chairs attached or maybe a few round tables with seats all around them. No matter what comes to mind when you think of a classroom, there is usually a front of the room, and a teacher standing there. The front of the room is seen as a place of power; all students must pay attention to whoever if speaking at the front of the classroom. This is the usual scene in a classroom, a teacher talking and the student politely listening. It has been this way for a long time, but what if there was a better way. Would it be possible to increase classroom production by shifting the roles and power in a classroom? A classroom is a setting, and everyone in the classroom plays …show more content…
Well, the idea that any occasion of face-to-face interaction can be interpreted as a theatrical performance is called Dramaturgy (Goffman, E. 2008). A sociologist by the name of Erving Goffman coined this term in 1959, he believed the idea that life is like a never-ending play in which all people are actors. In his writing, The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life, Goffman outlined how we have roles, front stage, faces and more in our everyday social interactions. Our interactions in the classroom would be one example that nearly everyone could relate to, the traditional “teacher-student” power roles that we all know could be changed to reveal a more beneficial learning environment.
First, before we begin to switch up the roles in the classroom, we must understand what Dramaturgy is. Of course, we have the actors, this is all people in everyday life; then the people who observe what we or others are doing, the audience; and then we have our stage, although in there are different parts, or regions, to our stage. The front stage, for instance, is where the performance or social interaction takes place. It is visible to the audience and to all other actors.