Navigating Resistance: Power and Labor in the Urban Classroom [pt. 1]
As a teacher, I used to assume that every classroom was built on the same foundation of care and thoughtful planning that I strived for. I believed each teacher approached their work with cultural responsiveness and intentionality. But now, as an administrator, my perspective has grown to encompass more possibilities. While I still see great practices, I’ve begun to see teaching as a labor that also comes with its own forms of resistance.
“When the output of said labor isn’t products on an assembly line, but rather students who don’t always translate neatly into being one’s clientele, that resistance can take on different shapes—especially in an urban school setting, where the dynamics are more complex.”
I’ve continued to apply Marxist principles to education, examining how labor in the classroom is produced, valued, and controlled. I’ve argued (and presented research in the past) that teachers are positioned as laborers under the watchful eye of administrators and state standards, a kind of panopticon that surveils, enforces, and demands compliance, often to the detriment of both teachers and students—especially in urban schools. The production line model reduces teaching to tasks and outputs, not always aligned with student growth or intellectual development.
I’ve found the need to modify this framework because as I visit classrooms, I see particular power dynamics at play. Often with the teacher enacting power on a population that has limited agency. In one model, teachers act as facilitators, outsourcing instruction to digital platforms, leaving students to navigate their learning alone. In another, classrooms are buzzing with activities like games or group reviews, but often without clear links to deeper learning. And then there’s the hands-off approach, where students have a loose agenda and the teacher manages from the sidelines. Across these models, students become the casualties of an educational system that treats them not as the primary beneficiaries, but as byproducts of a labor force working under constraint.
What troubles me most is the disconnect between the labor teachers perform and the needs of students. If these teachers' own children were in these classrooms, would they find the hands-off approach acceptable? If teaching is simply labor, then students aren’t viewed as clients or collaborators in their own learning, but as outputs, measured and standardized like any other product.
For those of us in leadership, our role must be to challenge this framework—to support professional growth and foster a system where students are truly at the center. The system, as it stands, often undermines the human connections that make education transformative.
Our task is to shift this dynamic so that the labor of teaching is aligned with the liberation of students.
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Our task is to shift this dynamic so that the labor of teaching is aligned with the liberation of students. 〰️
Ultimately, I’ve realized that my responsibility is to help ensure that all children—not just a few—receive the kind of teaching that empowers them, not just to pass through the system, but to truly flourish within it.
