ABSTRACT
Pedagogical authority is a crucial intermediary step in Bourdieu and Passeron’s (1970/1977) model for the reproduction of any educational system. We agree with placing authority at the center of what educational researchers should consider, but we do this with a major caveat: Authority must not be approached as the property of a position or person that others must accept. It is a property of an interaction, constituted by the active work of all involved, regardless of the position they may display. We argue this point by looking carefully at two brief moments when four students and a teacher joke without disrupting the flow of the lesson. We place these moments within the lesson in which they occurred and within the history of the school as it was made to articulate with at least three major movements in the United States relating to religion, poverty, and pedagogy. Our main focus remains on the continuing attempt to understand major features of American schooling, particularly the asymmetries between teachers and students, in a fashion that fully acknowledges the work that all involved must continually perform for the overall cultural form to persist across generations of students. Our specific focus is to explore the place of play in work that constitutes particular forms of asymmetries.
