My Body Had a Mind of Its Own: On Teaching, the Illusion of Control, and the Terrifying Limits of Governmentality (Part II)

In the final installment of her two-part essay, Julia Eklund Koza analyzes prevalent control and management discourse in education, specifically, music education. Arguing that dominant understandings are hierarchical, gendered, illusory, and integrally related to projects and practices largely unrelated to schooling, she invites teachers and teacher educators to explore the possibilities created when different assumptions about teaching and control are applied. Koza maintains that recognizing the limits of governmentality, bankrupting illusions of control, and uncoupling associations between uncertainty and terror are powerful political disruptions. Acknowledging that classroom control may be neither achievable nor desirable may open the door to different understandings of classroom power relations and to re-articulations of the purposes of schooling. Koza calls for the use of different metaphors and frames as a first step in achieving different educational outcomes.