The Omnipotent Presence and Power of Teacher-Student Transactional Communication Relationships in the Classroom: The So-Called “Post-Race Era” (Constructing Knowledge: Curriculum Studies in Action)

This work provides a forthright critical discussion aimed at providing salient insights into the quiet and under-realized transactional nature of education, schooling, teaching, student participation, and learning. The work is based upon five major interacting premises regarding the role, nature, and relationship between transactional communication and equity pedagogy, which place opportunities to teach and learn in flux. Throughout this book the topic/issue of transitional communication’s critical role serves as the unifying source regarding the transdisciplinary nature of the information and perspectives presented 90 plus percent of activities which occurs in the classroom involves the social-perception experiences of interpersonal-cultural communication, pre-dispositions and inclinations, regarding power and felt empowerment, and one’s lived positionality experiences. Transactional communicative awareness, critical reflection, and cultural responsiveness enhances equality of opportunities to teach and learn in view of the demands ensured during a course of study or term of study. Transaction, the interaction, the transfer, the transference (and most definitely what's left behind) in exchange during interpersonal communications, is the focus in this work. Transaction infers the transfer-exchange of action from one to another, that is, a personal balancing between one to/and another. The use of transaction that is being brought to your attention has to do with the public-private institutional process in schooling and education, and by necessity involves other places in public sphere, where these institutions are situated in neighborhoods that make up communities across this multi-cultured nation. It is the circumstance, intent, and the conditions under which student-student and teacher-students interact that the author refers to as the endeavors of transactional communication. In other words, transactional communication as discerned in this work, has to do with the on-going interactive dealings regarding the purpose of facilitating, discussing, conversing, and the offering up of academic work to be assessed and sanctioned, that demonstrate degrees of learnedness as part of human development. However, it is what which informs and flavors the social-psychology, id est, the thoughts, feelings, interpretative-perceptions, and behaviors, occurring in our looking at and considering one another during transactional communicative interactions that ultimately shapes the outcome. Our direct and indirect intra-interpersonal interactions (which are unconsciously-socially being substituted one for another via the social media), are influenced by the imagination, circumstance, and the implications regarding the presence of each another during transactive encounters. Unfortunately, many times we don't even try to see one another during potentially tense and important situations and meetings; the interaction simply goes to raw data, attitudes, from years of domesticated thinking, swimming in a soup of trained behaviors, where power wags its tail. Though the use of transdisciplinary discourse, punctuated by autoethnographical knowledge, and integrative interaction with the research literature, this book is organized around five central reciprocally interacting premises. These premises point to the relevancy of our transaction in interpersonal-cultural-gendered-racialized-social-class dealings, and the importance and necessity in considering and working with what informs them; within the complexity and sensibilities among and within us, in our diverse multi-cultural nation Front Matter....Pages i-xxiii Front Matter....Pages 1-1 Defining and Discussing Transactional Communication....Pages 3-36 Student Voice....Pages 37-49 Power....Pages 51-64 Seeking to Transact....Pages 65-92 Postscript....Pages 93-96 Front Matter....Pages 97-97 Systems Thinking and Intervention....Pages 99-107 Motivating Human Learning and Development....Pages 109-117 Why Structural Inequalities? What Are Its Negative Relationships with Human Diversity?....Pages 119-132 Information Processing Leading to Thinking and Behavioral Performance....Pages 133-133 Back Matter....Pages 135-137