Politics of Identity and Power Distribution in Practice, Pedagogy, and Curriculum: Personal Reflections of Teacher Supervisors in Morocco

Abstract

An educational system that aspires to be effective would constantly strive to bring about positive change into the society and the students it is meant to serve. Attending school would amount to a waste of time unless the experience manages to make a difference in the students’ lives regarding how they view themselves and the others around them.After all, education is not about stuffing students with knowledge; it is mostly about inspiring and empowering young learnerswith the knowledge that being different-with regards to gender, skin colour or social class - does not necessarily amount to being inferior. The aim of this reflective report is threefold. First, it tries to identify the relationship between knowledge and power.It will also elaborate on the concept of identity as a socio-cultural construct with deep implications for classroom practices,before closing with an investigation into how students and teachers' complex and diverse identities interact and shape the knowledge and power constructed in classroom practices, pedagogy, and curriculum. As implications, the paper concludes with the idea that there are yet a number of teacing and learning aspects to be explored before the classroom becomes a space where various identities are equally valued and recognized instead of a space where a sense of unequal distributon of power (and steriotypes unfairly associated with some identities) is maintained and perpetuated .