High School Principal and Student Power Relationships When Students Choose Distance Education Courses

Abstract

This mixed methods study explains how principals of conventional high schools in Alberta, Canada responded in an educational context where students over the age of 16 did not require their principals’ approval to enroll in external distance education courses. The research questions address this through power relations between principals and students, as manifested by what principals and students said and did in this context. Foucault’s post-structuralist framework of disciplinary, governmentality, and pastoral power techniques provided the theoretical framework for analyzing discursive and nondiscursive practices. Disciplinary power has productive subjects as its focus. Governmentality embodies ways in which states control individuals by dispersing power among populations. The focus of pastoral power is the ethical development of subjects. The initial subjects were 87 Alberta high school principals that completed survey questions capturing demographic data, servant leadership characteristics, and distance education perspectives. Survey results assisted in identifying nine principals that constituted cases in a multiple-case study. The principal and a student at each school participated in interviews that provided primary data. Foucault’s theoretical framework offered 31 power techniques as factors for coding interviews. This study found that the nine principals tended to be conveyors of power, primarily through disciplinary and governmentality techniques. These techniques manifested through three dominant practices: (1) institutionalizing access to distance education courses through the school; (2) supporting course and program choice to increase graduation rates, keep students busy, earn credit funding from the province, and address the life and learning needs of specific students; and (3) assigning students to the classroom option, except in special situations, if both distance education and classroom options were available. The nine students in this study tended to constitute themselves as targets of disciplinary and pastoral power. In the context of distance education course choice, three practices were found to operate synergistically on students: (1) the province, through the school, offered numerous approved programs and choices; (2) students chose classroom and distance education programs or courses they needed or that represented interests; and (3) the school accommodated special life circumstances or learning requirements through classroom and distance education offerings.