‘But we didn’t put it to a vote!’. A case study of direct-democratic decision-making in formal education

Abstract

The current study examined the unofficial implementation of direct-democratic decision-making assemblies in three typical public (state) schools of consecutive educational levels (kindergarten, primary and middle school) in a village in Greece. The study drew on Michel Foucault’s analysis of power technologies and power relations in disciplinary dispositives like Education. The main aim of the study was to investigate the ways in which both pupils and teachers engaged with the disciplinary technology inherent in the educational dispositive and to document their conceptualization and attitudes towards these direct-democratic assemblies. The research methodology utilized participant observation and semi-structured interviews. Findings indicated that the disciplinary technology continued to function as per the dominant dispositive, despite the implementation of direct-democratic decision-making assemblies, while pupils generally exhibited a sense of empowerment, displaying support and being influenced in their daily lives by the assemblies’ governmentality. Minor challenges concerning the implementation of such assemblies are addressed and further possibilities of such implementations are discussed.