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Dorfman, Dorinne

College of Education and Social Services

2004

Ed. D.

While a plethora of research reviews the theories and shares the practices of democratic education, the purpose of this study was to expose the tenets of a democratic school disciplinary system. A review of the literature demonstrated three crucial elements of this system, high quality, student-centered instruction, a positive school climate, and a series of interrelationships between professionals and families who contribute to the construction and maintenance of disciplinary protocols. To more deeply examine this foundation, I studied four public secondary schools in northern New England, two of which I defined as community democracies, and two traditional schools demographically comparable to the first pair. A community democratic school provides a multicultural, constructivist learning environment, fosters active communication systems between diverse constituents, and maintains several governance structures to involve students in the highest levels of decision-making.
Over a four-month period, I visited each institution four full school days in order to observe classroom instruction in the social studies, examine practices in the Teacher-Advisory program, shadow the administrator charged with implementing the school disciplinary system, and interview all cooperating educators, which totaled thirteen study participants. My questions addressed their vision of the dream classroom, their educational philosophy, their classroom management style, and their perceptions regarding school governance and the school disciplinary system. I also reviewed school documents, such as student and faculty handbooks and the program of studies. School observations focused on educator behavior, words spoken and actions taken, which contributed to instructional proceedings and to the total school experience. Socioeconomic data on the communities served by the schools became increasingly pronounced in data reporting, since funding access affected the availability and the structure of school programs. In the two traditional schools, areas most significantly impacted included teacher quality, course offerings, facilities, community involvement, and access to technology. However, the low-income democratic school redesigned its decision-making structures and learning pathways in order to encourage instructional innovation, community collaboration, and student empowerment, thus overcoming financial constraints, excepting the availability of technology.
In the two community democratic schools, my study revealed several principal elements of democratic school discipline. These include the encompassment of community interests and self-discipline in instruction; the redesign of the school disciplinary system to reflect the beliefs and practices of community democracy; and the installation of school administrators who possess convictions of egalitarianism and social justice. Systems redesign and intellective agency further the goal of democratic discipline, not to reduce misbehavior as conventionally conceived, but to balance the tension between the giveness (Greene, 1978) of compulsory schooling and its concomitant of transformational awakening. Hence the goal of democratic school discipline is to discover oneself, understand one's community, and balance this dualism (Dewey, 1944). Students' rights as school citizens do not cease when statutory infractions occur. Instead a process of intellective reconciliation transpires among a broad constituency to further understanding of the omnipresent tension of the self and society, and the resultant perpetual possibility of transformation.