This review has been accessed  times since March 11, 2000
Gallas, Karen. (1997). Sometimes I can be anything:
Power, gender, and identity in a primary classroom.
New York: Teachers College Press.
168 pp.
$18.95 (Paper) 0-8077-3695-3
$41.00 (Cloth) 0-8077-3696-1
Reviewed by William Pawluk
California State University, Los Angeles
March 11,2000
In her third book Sometimes I can be Anything: Power,
gender and identity in a primary classroom, (1997)
Karen Gallas presents a qualitative examination of her
primary classroom that represents four years of inquiry.
Her purpose is to provide the reader with an "in-depth look
at how the children she taught worked to understand the
social terrain of the classroom" (p. 3). Her goals were to
provide an interpretative rendering of the ways in which
her children used power to negotiate gender issues and
perform identities. The goal of this interpretation was
not to assign adult meanings to her observations, but to
understand what goes on beneath the surface of classroom
interaction from the children's point of view, "the sense
that children make out of classroom texts" (p. 23). Gallas
develops this concept of the subtextual as a kind of
dynamic that operated beneath the surface of classroom
life, yet had great influence on her children's work in
school. Reifying this subtext—making it available to
readers of her book—becomes the most powerful aspect
of her work.
Her book began as an attempt to focus on the construction
of gender in elementary school settings, "over time,
however, it became clear that the children I taught did not
naturally separate their understandings of gender from
those of race and class" (p.3). Her children's
interactions were much more integrated than she at first
believed and defied simple categorization; they were much
more concerned with issues of power and social control
within their particular space and time.
The most significant conclusion is what appears to be
obvious yet sheds light on the subtext of performance,
viz., that her children's "desire to be part of a classroom
community has a powerful influence on their work in
every kind of classroom text, both those they
created, and those I presented to them" (p. 4).
Identifying and describing in great depth children's
underlying need to belong—to be in relationship with
others—provides the reader with a framework from which to
better understand and deal with behavior that often
bewilders the adult mind.
Gallas's Methodology
Gallas's practitioner inquiry involves the use of many
texts and events that were observed and audio-taped at
particular classroom times which occur with regularity each
week and were deliberately planned to encourage children to
talk together without her direct orchestration. These
times included sharing time, in which the child sits in the
teachers chair and directs his or her own time in telling a
story or a mystery of their own design, science talks and
morning journal times.
In addition, field notes of children were taken during
formal and informal classroom events, their playground
recess activities as well as from samples of their writing
and artwork. Other research notes and tape recordings
resulted from formal discussions and interviews that were
necessitated to help resolve a particular classroom
dilemma. The goals were to observe "naturalistic" child
directed social interactions with the hope that children
would drop their guard, be free to express themselves and
allow hidden agendas to surface (p. 10).
When the goals of research are to understand and describe
the sense that children make of classroom life and assign
meaning to the behavior they exhibit in this work, the task
of critiquing such research is challenging.
The greatest strength of Gallas's work is the quality of
her testimony. Bringing almost two decades of
teaching experience to four years worth of data gathering
gives her ample time to know the culture and establish
trust with her students. She engaged in a daily
developmental process with her students and demonstrated
that their confidences would not be used against them, that
the interests of her students would be honored as well as
her own and that her students would have input into the
inquiry process.
As an insider to the site she is studying, Gallas deals
with the potential problem of losing her research
perspective by engaging in an on-going self-conscious
examination of the subjective nature of her research
endeavor. Being a member of the Brookline Teacher Research
Seminar and meeting weekly with other teacher researchers
to present and discuss data from their classrooms helped to
limit the tendency to "go native" and overlook
understandings of student behavior that an outsider may
observe.
Gallas continuously employs different methods such as her
use of interview, observation, audiotape recording and
field notes. For example, consider an incident in which
Gallas interrupts a game played by Rachel, a formerly
silent child. Rachel tells her friends that they can
continue playing the game in their heads while the teacher
is telling the story. Then Gallas replies "Rachel I know
that's what you've been doing the past two years in story,
'cause I've watched you" (p.126). Rachel confirms verbally
the hunch that Gallas had been nurturing over the past two
years. It is time consuming to apply different methods but
the result in this case was that the teacher/researcher
entered briefly into the world of the child, understood
what was going on and had it confirmed.
Even as the overlap of methods helps to ensure the study
has credibility it could be argued that the study is
dependable by the same criteria. Gallas would be trapped
in this quandary if it were not for the Brookline Teacher
Research Seminar. I assume that during these weekly
meetings assessments were made to ascertain whether
findings were grounded in data and whether inferences based
on the data were logical, as well as assess the quality of
interpretations and examine possible alternative
understandings. Confirmability of research is enhanced by
the sharing of data, findings and interpretations and
begins to take on the form of inquiry auditing.
Nevertheless, the fact that Gallas worked alone in
gathering data as well as the apparent lack of a formal
audit process may be viewed by some as undermining the
confirmability of her findings. What needs to be stressed
here is that Gallas was not seeking to establish "findings"
in the traditional sense that could be transferred
haphazardly to other contexts; rather she was seeking to
provide an insiders view of her children's processes in
understanding the social terrain of the classroom.
This book review would not be complete without including
some insight into the authors' theoretical perspective in
her work. I feel this quotation captures the essence of
Gallas's approach.
Who I am, or who an individual child I teach will become,
is always a continuing piece of work, constructed in
relation to the other, in conversation with the other, and,
in the best of all possible worlds, in communion with the
other. (p. 140)
Gallas's influences come from several sources, noticeably
the influence of Paulo Freire (1987), constructivist theory
and Bakhtin's (1981) ideas on building dialogic communities
in which learning is mutually negotiated. A recurring
premise in her work is the view that humans are the
products of social interaction and that identity can be
constructed and apprehended only within the context of
social relations.
Researching these social relations in her classroom Gallas
struggled to, "separate what she had observed and recorded
from her own social viewpoints" (p. 5), while realizing
that she was not able to function as a dispassionate
observer. In addition to the challenge of remaining open
to new understandings and standing in the discomforting
gray zone of uncertainty, Gallas had to constantly deal
with the influence of her own presence in the classroom.
"In many ways, the fact that I am watching [influences the
quality of] what I am able to see, [and] grows in direct
proportion to the children's realization that I am watching
and listening and desiring to know how they understand
their world" (p. 31). Yes her presence had impact; the
result was that her children responded to this desire to
understand by allowing her to see more of their world.
In her attempt to understand this world, she borrows the
concept of "La Frontera" from Estrada and McClaren (1993)
and views the classroom as territory to be mapped rather
than as a simple microcosm of the larger social world with
all it's ideological and theoretical assumptions. These
assumptions form the psychosocial foundations that become
the basis of our stereotypes and subsequently influence our
interpretations of events. Being aware of this tendency to
fall back on what one "knows" in our drive for equilibrium
is an important first step in understanding the ever
changing dynamic of human relations. She reconceptualizes
the children's ongoing social interactions as a series of
performances that were reinvented on a daily basis. Within
these dramatic frameworks children assume—try on—different
persona, experiment with different roles, all the
while paying close attention to the dynamics and
consequences of their efforts. For Gallas these efforts
involve not just learning but most importantly, "finding
and maintaining a place in their social milieu, gaining the
attention and respect of their friends" (p. 13).
So what is the value of this type of inquiry, what is the
value of reading Gallas's book length study? If the
findings are uncertain, explicitly non-transferable or
generalizable to other contexts then what is the point of
this type of work? A policy maker or politician would not
likely read a book like this, because he or she would not
find the quick answers charts and graphs that could be
folded into a self serving "sound byte," or aid them in
putting in place yet another futile policy to improve test
scores.
It should be obvious that top down pressures, external
demands and coercive strategies have failed to improve the
practice of teaching. Educators are largely motivated by
incentives that are different from incentives found in the
world of business or industry, and they will continue to
successfully resist uninformed, poorly implemented demands
to bring about change. Educators often see these demands
as threats that fly in the face of the ideals they embraced
as they embarked on a teaching career, while placing
distance between practices that they own or embrace and the
practice that is expected of them. If a policy maker were
to spend a little time around teachers, he or she would not
hear them discussing the latest research "findings" and the
ways in which they could be implemented. On the contrary,
what the policy maker would likely hear would be stories
about their students as part of a long-standing oral craft
tradition.
The value of practitioner inquiry is that it holds the
potential to improve the practice of teaching. Change,
improvement is much more likely if it is the result of
internal conviction as a result of a new experience or
understanding. Anderson et al. (1994, p.34). The beauty of
Sometimes I can be Anything is that it provides the
reader with numerous vicarious experiences that enable them
to look at old problems in new ways, and provides valuable
insights into the world of children that can be of great
value to educators of all levels of experience.
References
Anderson, G., Herr, K., Sigrid Nihlen, A. (1994).
Studying your own school: An educator's guide to
qualitative practitioner research. Thousand Oaks, CA:
Corwin Press.
Bakhtin, M. M. (1981). The dialogic
imagination. Austin, TX: University of Texas Press.
Estrada, K., & McClaren, P. (1993). A dialogue on
multiculturalism in democratic culture. Educational
Researcher, 22(3), 28-29.
Freire, P. & Macedo, D. (1987). Literacy: Reading
the word and the world. New York: Bergin and Garvey.
Lincoln, Yvonna & Guba, Egon (1985). Naturalistic
Inquiry. Newbury Park, CA: SAGE.
About the Reviewer
William Pawluk
Email: wpawluk@earthlink.net
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