ABSTRACT
This chapter explores the knowledge and of institutional authority over knowledge through an ethnography of an introductory undergraduate university course on Middle East history. It presents an ethnography of an undergraduate introductory history course, revealing the structures that determined who could speak, when, how and by what right. The chapter discusses a counterspace that learners created, and also discusses the role that the space served against the backdrop of the structures. The chapter examines how instructors struggle with the tension between cultivating a command of the conventions of the field and a constructivist approach to knowledge, and how learners struggle with the tension between institutional achievement and intellectual self-expression and growth. It analyses that reveal a disappointing picture of instructors and learners employing self-defeating strategies and working at cross-purposes in the formal spaces of learning. The chapter concludes with a critical discussion of the costs involved in the space-counterspace dynamic, and of possibilities for future positive change.
