[Re]Negotiating Power and Influence in the Classroom

The communication of power in instructional settings involves rhetorical and relational messages. McCroskey and colleagues initiated the study of power in the classroom in the 1980s. Today's scholars have broadened their power conceptualization and their focus on its instructional communication manifestation. The initial "Power in the Classroom" studies revealed teachers and students shared some views of how instructors convey power and instructor power was related to learning. Student resistance is defined as students' constructive or destructive oppositional classroom behavior enacted to resist instructors' influence attempts. Changes in political structures and economic systems, such as in Russia and China, have also brought long-held traditions of power in the classroom to the forefront. Recent cross-cultural research on classroom power has tended to focus on China and the United States. Goodboy et al. observed that referent power in China predicted students' satisfaction, which predicted students using more behavioral alteration techniques (BATs).