This post first appeared on aud.life
Dave’s #rhizo15 prompt this week asks us what happens if we get rid of Dave… Or “Dave,” I should say. That is, what happens in a classroom (or learning experience) without an instructor? He asks,
what is the role of the facilitator/teacher/professor where we are using learning subjectives, where learning isn’t measured and where content is actually other people? What cultural concepts do we have that we can use as models? Do we need a new model?
My immediate thought: “the tyranny of structurelessness.”
Although we should think about ways in which we can decenter the classroom from the teacher, doing so does not erase power. To argue that it does is at best naive and at worst, I think, implicated in a sort of privilege that hasn’t had to notice how power and privilege operate.
From Jo Freeman’s 1970 essay:
Contrary to what we would like to believe, there is no such thing as a structureless group. Any group of people of whatever nature that comes together for any length of time for any purpose will inevitably structure itself in some fashion. The structure may be flexible; it may vary over time; it may evenly or unevenly distribute tasks, power and resources over the members of the group. But it will be formed regardless of the abilities, personalities, or intentions of the people involved. The very fact that we are individuals, with different talents, predispositions, and backgrounds makes this inevitable. Only if we refused to relate or interact on any basis whatsoever could we approximate structurelessness – and that is not the nature of a human group.
This means that to strive for a structureless group is as useful, and as deceptive, as to aim at an “objective” news story, “value-free” social science, or a “free” economy. A “laissez faire” group is about as realistic as a “laissez faire” society; the idea becomes a smokescreen for the strong or the lucky to establish unquestioned hegemony over others. This hegemony can be so easily established because the idea of “structurelessness” does not prevent the formation of informal structures, only formal ones. Similarly “laissez faire” philosophy did not prevent the economically powerful from establishing control over wages, prices, and distribution of goods; it only prevented the government from doing so. Thus structurelessness becomes a way of masking power, and within the women’s movement is usually most strongly advocated by those who are the most powerful (whether they are conscious of their power or not). As long as the structure of the group is informal, the rules of how decisions are made are known only to a few and awareness of power is limited to those who know the rules. Those who do not know the rules and are not chosen for initiation must remain in confusion, or suffer from paranoid delusions that something is happening of which they are not quite aware.
More from Freeman on elitism in groups (something I think is incredibly relevant to the way in which network and power operates in “open education”):
Some groups, depending on their size, may have more than one such informal communications network. Networks may even overlap. When only one such network exists, it is the elite of an otherwise Unstructured group, whether the participants in it want to be elitists or not. If it is the only such network in a Structured group it may or may not be an elite depending on its composition and the nature of the formal Structure. If there are two or more such networks of friends, they may compete for power within the group, thus forming factions, or one may deliberately opt out of the competition, leaving the other as the elite. In a Structured group, two or more such friendship networks usually compete with each other for formal power. This is often the healthiest situation, as the other members are in a position to arbitrate between the two competitors for power and thus to make demands on those to whom they give their temporary allegiance.
The inevitably elitist and exclusive nature of informal communication networks of friends is neither a new phenomenon characteristic of the women’s movement nor a phenomenon new to women. Such informal relationships have excluded women for centuries from participating in integrated groups of which they were a part. In any profession or organization these networks have created the “locker room” mentality and the “old school” ties which have effectively prevented women as a group (as well as some men individually) from having equal access to the sources of power or social reward. Much of the energy of past women’s movements has been directed to having the structures of decision-making and the selection processes formalized so that the exclusion of women could be confronted directly.
At the end of her essay, Freeman does offer suggestions for the “democratic structuring” of groups. And arguably these might be a better guide than deposing Dave and assuming that a rhizomatic utopia will follow: 1) “delegation of authority to specific individuals for specific tasks by democratic procedures.” 2) Requiring that those who have authority be responsible to those who selected them. 3) “Distribution of authority among as many people as is reasonably possible.” 4) Rotation of tasks among individuals. 5) Allocation of tasks “along rational criteria.” 6) “Diffusion of information to everyone as frequently as possible. Information is power.” 7) Equal access to the necessary resources.
Perhaps my hesitation here is connected to the ways in which leaderless learning dovetails so nicely with Silicon Valley's and the techno-libertarians' arguments about autodidacts. Those "roaming autodidacts," as Tressie McMillan Cottom calls them, are precisely the ones poised to take advantage of this power vacuum. It would serve their needs and their networks quite nicely.