Heterarchic Interpretations of Family Involvement[1]

Peter Appelbaum, Arcadia University

JCI→CI: Journal of Critical Inquiry Into Curriculum and Instruction 4 (2) 2002.

Parent involvement and family involvement programs are a consistent strand of educational reform efforts, with wide-ranging interpretations of "involvement" and its influence on reform, outcomes, and community (Edge 1998; Epstein 1996; Fine 1993; Gamer & Mastaby 1994). Power, difference, and social stratification are often linked with patterns of family and parent involvement and urban educational reform (Wells et al. 1999; Jeller et al. 1999). Most research and theoretical work has framed the questions in modernist discourses of power and identity. When such approaches are used, it makes it possible to recognize and respond to hierarchies of power and authority, and to design policies that take social stratification into account. This article offers alternative, "heterarchic" interpretations as parallel to common sense notions, not as a theoretical or practical improvement on other work. Heterarchic refers to forms of organization and structures of categorization that are more like a network or web than a pyramid or ladder. Authority is determined more by knowledge and function than by position. One strength of heterarchic ideas is that they provide a means for getting around the problems of dichotomies. One looks for ideas that encompass both ends of a continuum but do not limit themselves to the continuum. For example, instead of talking about the homeless and the sheltered, one can talk about nomads, who are neither homeless nor sheltered, but are also both homeless and sheltered. I look for ways to use such an approach to thinking about family involvement. My goal is to offer a fresh source of theoretical ideas through which curriculum studies workers can inform and guide their practice. The article uses a case study of a magnet school in an integrated school district to introduce interpretative options and possibilities, and through this introduction, to develop a “heterarchic” approach. First I examine common problems and approaches to family involvement. I discuss how these common problems and approaches are not effective for understanding and responding to the case study situation. Finally, I suggest that the common approaches are mostly designed to convince people to work for family involvement where there is little or none. A heterarchic approach can be useful for comprehending the complexities of family involvement beyond the initial stages, when people begin to experience the frustrations that certain common approaches to family involvement unintentionally create. This article is a tale of a particular school in a particular district. The tale is used to introduce new ways of thinking about what I observed and participated in as a researcher.

Consorting within "Choice"

Consorting with the enemy is how Mary Henry (1996) phrased the assumptions of professional context that framed a school district's introduction of family and community involvement (p.62). She referred to several categories of action in her field work: beliefs that teachers should teach and parents should parent; conflicts over goals and interests expressed as the big picture of educators versus the self-interested motives of parents; the tradition of teachers working in isolation with children; a conservative administrative culture, whose well-established norms and ways of doing business defined the School Board function as legitimator of school decisions; and questions of loyalty and responsibility, whereby school administrators felt that they had to support either teachers or parents in the face of conflict. The Washington State district that Henry studied was forced by shifting mores regarding parent involvement, including state legislation, to review and reposition themselves as people open to shared power and decision-making. Yet, because they approached this change cautiously and used traditional administrative strategies, the schools were mired in scientific management with a separation of roles and responsibilities, and the parents found themselves defined and constrained by a bureaucratic system that undermined parent-school collaboration. For communities entering a phase of collaboration, there exist strong warnings regarding the declaration of family involvement as a goal without parallel reflection on the structures and procedures of organization.

Westside, New Jersey (my pseudonym for the case study district discussed in this article) has a contrasting reputation for thirty years of successful community involvement in its integrated schools. All six elementary (K-5) schools and the three middle schools are themed magnet schools of choice. School review teams are the decision-making bodies of each school, consisting of administrators, professional staff, and parents. Active community volunteer programs add valuable resources to the schools, including middle school writing centers, the use of area non-profit agencies as the sites of classes, and active groups promoting attention to equity and integration issues; the district maintains an active parent education program that includes trained community volunteers who lead family math nights at the schools, and who volunteer to teach special courses in mathematics at the middle schools. Each of the schools emphasizes family programs. Rainbow Family Magnet School in particular, one of the six K-5 schools, has as its magnet theme "family and the environment," with family involvement in classrooms and school programs as a major focus of its curriculum. Despite Westside's long-standing efforts toward community participation, however, it is still possible to summarize much of the professional context as consorting with the enemy. In general, teachers teach and parents parent, even at Rainbow; parent volunteers are routinely assigned mundane tasks in their weekly or monthly hours in the classroom, rarely utilize personal interests or skills, and typically lose interest in such work by the upper grades. Power is clearly not shared. The choice system effectively diffuses all power because dissatisfaction with a magnet school means that a parent has the option of selecting one of the other magnets for their child; therefore, schools need not be responsive to individual students or disappointment in the school's success at implementing the magnet theme. Indeed, the themes themselves are somewhat meaningless under district pressure to simultaneously achieve a common district curriculum in academic subject areas, new state curriculum frameworks, and new state tests in fourth, eighth, and eleventh grades designed to drive instructional change. Community relations are managed through well-attended district school board, school review, and parent education meetings. The community involvement at the district level, and family involvement at Rainbow, serve to heighten the management toward clear delineation of roles separating administrators and teachers from parents and community members. School personnel perceive citizens and parents as routinely overstepping their bounds in the sorts of demands that they assert, and thus requiring pleasant but strong containment.

The choice plan further undermines family involvement under a top-down management system, since each principal must both compete for site-based budget allocations and market their school to new families every year (Kohn 1998). The competition causes intense anxiety. For example, as parents compare average school scores on the Metropolitan Achievement Tests that emphasize traditional outcomes of drill and practice curricula, their focus on these scores vandalizes the parallel performance on state assessments that stress mathematical reasoning and communication. At Rainbow, whose mission statement includes a commitment to collaborative work and non-competitive group problem solving, the principal recently introduced a "Century Club," whose privileged members have totaled 100 points on weekly timed quizzes she prepares and administers herself. The family and environment theme has been overshadowed by the message of an enormous banner declaring "We're smarter because we work harder," an attempt to attract students from families who do not find the theme or current mission statement appealing, but might be excited by the banner during the annual shop-around open-house week. Meanwhile, there is a rumored exodus of a large number of affluent white students (currently over-represented) to other magnets in response to the hard work mantra recited in the halls, and the increased emphasis on competition and drill work.

A Common Sense Approach to Family Involvement

However, Westside's history of "successful" integration and reputation of economic diversity help to identify ways in which commonly used categories of stakeholders, or interest groups, can be defined. For example, quite often race trumps professional categories, so that a principal of one school may succeed in pushing through a change supported by some but not a cross-race majority of parents. In other cases, class trumps race, so that meetings can witness highly subtle debates regarding open-ended performance tasks opposed to weekly quizzes on multiplication facts that sometimes break down by race, but more often correlate with the size of the parents' houses.

There are clashes of culture in this community, but the clashes are constantly shifting and complex, so that common theorizations of family involvement seem inadequate. As I look at seemingly more homogeneous neighboring communities, I find that the theorization I offer here makes more sense in general. Therefore, I present a different, “heterarchic,” conceptualization based on the nomadic epistemology of Deleuze and Guattari (1987). I want to question common approaches to family involvement that construct schools, mathematics education, community groups, and so on, as clashing cultures, and educators/researchers as cultural workers.[2] First, I will demonstrate the possibilities of common approaches, and why they might initially seem to explicate the dynamics of family involvement. Then I will offer alternative approaches, dubbed "heterarchic," for their attempts to circumvent the hierarchies inherent in the common sense approached I wish to replace.

In the common scheme, the educator/researcher's role is to facilitate border crossings that promote successful collaboration among the various cultures. In "The Complex World of an Embedded Institution," Alan Peshkin (1995) delineates five categories of constituencies, each of which are formed by their type of constituent interest in schools, the basis of that interest, and their relationships with seven subcategories of the Beneficiary constituency. The impact, according to Peshkin, influences what schools do, what they should not do, what they should do better, and what they should do that is not currently done (p. 247). As long as constituent interests and their extant pedagogical implications go uncontested, schools remain quiet; the status quo is taken as the proper order of things. If contested, interests become stakes, and stakeholders learn the boundaries of their interests, where they clash with those of others, and the extent of their own tendency to hold onto their own (p. 252-3).

According to the clashing cultures model of community involvement, no one culture can capture the "total picture" and is, by the very fact of a constituency, partial. Peshkin writes,

...interests invest constituents in some dimension of schooling that usually is well short of the whole educational life of learners, educators, or schools. The partial nature of most constituent interests in schooling means, obviously, that most attend only to one aspect of school life. Attending to more than one aspect takes constituents beyond their interest, and, often, well beyond their expertise. (p. 253)

If parents and families constitute a constituency, then, as Davies (1994) points out, minimal parent or family involvement in schools may be because this constituency has made little demand. Recent work in mathematics education indicates a significant lack of attention to collaborative family involvement by the profession (Peressini 1996, 1997), and the current Standards 2000 draft even less than before (NCTM 1998). Parents are typically positioned in Standards documents as external supporters and little else. Yet, Davies notes the impetus for policy change on family involvement has come mainly from elites and policymakers, with minimal evidence of grassroots or consumer demands. Because families have not been involved in initiation, planning, or execution of new policies, Davies expects minimal benefits to disenfranchised 'end-users'. This holds in the New Jersey context; unlike, say, California or other localized reaction to Standards-based instruction, there is hardly any public media discussion of controversies in mathematics education. New York Times editorial page debates over the "new new math," or "fuzzy math" may be raised at board of education or school review meetings, and teachers express concern about preparing students according to the new state standards. However, family involvement is not a part of the discussions. Meanwhile, the state-sponsored New Jersey Mathematics Coalition run out of the state university system sponsors F.A.N.S. (Families Achieving New Standards) workshops free of charge to any group that contacts them. At least three members of the community -- myself, the director of a local soup kitchen, and a high school mathematics teacher -- have attended F.A.N.S. facilitators workshops, yet there have been no family workshops scheduled in Westside. The workshops themselves were prepared and facilitator-proofed to "teach" parents what their children will be experiencing under the new state standards for mathematics and science, and do not support the participation of families other than in traditional roles. Elsewhere in the state, parents and community members attending these workshops listen to what is going to be happening in classrooms across the state, participate in activities that are examples of what children will or already are experiencing, and leave with pamphlets describing new standards and workplace readiness skills. Activities that families can do together are promised for the future (New Jersey Mathematics Coalition 1997, 1998). There is no indication that Westside parents have seen or read the Parents' Guide available on-line (New Jersey Mathematics Coalition 1997).

If common interpretations of constituencies and cultures are applied within the district, analysis indicates parent/school relationships tend to be defined by perspectival interest. Active parents work to demand more information about the schools, their children, performance by race, and to influence the trajectory of curricular and magnet theme options for their own children. There is a vocal minority who voice consistent attacks on increased school spending at school board meetings, town council meetings, and in letters to the local newspaper, and this minority has become vocal in recent years because of severe decreases in state funding for the district. Administrators are routinely perceived as blocking parent participation beyond what can be "safely controlled." This supports Henry's experiences, in which the administrators in turn perceive this "arrogant administration" as more appropriately labeled "professional." The recent losses in state funding, for example, have led to the continued use of pre-Standards textbooks in mathematics, in order to preserve, broadly across the district, constituent programs as determined by administrative perception of the degree of importance to the majority of constituents.

The principal of Westside's K-5 Rainbow school listens to all parent complaints, ranging from the quantity of tedious mathematics homework to a lack of thematic units or mathematical talk in classrooms. But she also gets complaints about too much "down time" and not enough practice. The division of complaints in this case tends to fall along race and class lines, with white and affluent parents demanding more Standards-based instruction, and African-American parents demanding that teachers insist on their children practicing skills. The school is 60% white, 40% black, in a district that is closer to 50/50, and under pressure from the superintendent and School Board to more closely approximate the 50/50 goal. The principal therefore listens carefully to all parents. But she views her job, consistent with expectations from above, as including the mandate to lead (Henry, p. 79); anything less than decisive leadership would be considered weak and ineffectual from her perspective. This is a key to understanding her implementation of the "Century Club;" if theorized in terms of constituent interest, then her role is to lead the school toward a more equal participation by race, and this overrides any interest she has in achieving Standards-based curricula. If parents "choose" to switch to another magnet school, then these parents would be serving this same need since the families overwhelmingly fall into the "other" category that is over-represented. On the other hand, consistent listening maintains the appearance of "family involvement" and keeps the parents in a perpetual loop of wanting to participate and influence their child's school, and hoping that over time their relationship with the principal can lead to slow change. This is reflected as well in the meetings with the community that the new superintendent held as he was undergoing the interview process and then in beginning his work in the district. The local paper quoted him as excited about the degree of interest and involvement of community members, going as far as to suggest that this was a major factor in his decision to take on the challenge of the district. Further quotes suggested the particular challenge of satisfying the numerous constituencies within the district while maintaining integration and stemming the flow of affluent families to private schools.

Listening to parents works, to a degree, for parents keep hoping that one day there will be some action and their voiced needs and demands will be met. The mere act of providing a space for parents to voice concerns works well in maintaining the status quo and achieving equilibrium in the balance of power. The superintendent quietly reinforces a pattern of parental expression yet professional decision making [at board of education and open forum] meetings, where people are encouraged to voice concerns that will be considered by the board and the superintendent. (Henry, p. 79)

Because a constituency/cultures model posits successful collaboration in mathematics education as depending on how effectively individuals can move between their own culture and the organizational and bureaucratic culture of the school, theorists that construct cultural clash advocate interventions that enable transcending cultural borders. An adaptation of recommendations by Olugbemiro and Aikenhead (1999), originally suggested for life-world/school science cultural borders, suggests the following five interventions: 1) Make the border crossings explicit for all constituent cultures; 2) Facilitate border crossings; 3) Promote intergroup communication so that people are talking in their own cultural, interpretive framework, as well as in that of others, without denying the validity of their own culture; immerse people in only one culture at a time, so that participants are clearly aware of which culture they are in at a given time; 4) Substantiate and build upon the validity of marginalized cultures' personal and culturally constructed ways of knowing; and 5) teach the canonical content of school and district culture in the context of the role of schooling in the perspectives of the variety of constituent groups/cultures.[3]

Henry suggests strongly that part of every administrator's and teacher's education must include learning how to change organizational structures, to reframe home-school relations as collaborative, to relate to and communicate with parents in all their diversity, as well as with children (p.63). To be a professional educator would include the ability to relate to and team with a variety of people and organizations, including parents, citizens, and social agencies. In the context of mathematics education, it would be essential for administrators and teachers to continue their life-long reconceptualization of mathematics, and learning and assessment in mathematics, as their reacquaintance with the canon of school, and in terms of the implications of their reconceptualization for the varieties of constituent cultures. Recent research emphasizes indeed the need to understand the degree to which assessment supports and maintains hierarchies of power and prestige (Graue and Smith, 1996)

Barbara Gray (1989) recommends that such educators work to defuse particular obstacles to this sort of border crossing, including: institutional disincentives; historical and ideological barriers; power disparities among stakeholders; societal-level dynamics (such as the trend toward individualism in the U.S.); differing perceptions of the level of acceptable risk; technical complexity; and political and institutional norms. And Joyce Epstein (1988) specifically notes five goals for parent involvement that such educators should work to make an organic aspect of school life: parents meeting basic parental obligations; parents helping the school to meet its basic obligations; parental involvement in schools; parental involvement in learning activities at home; and parental involvement in governance and advocacy.

New Nomadic Theories

As parents, citizens, and others transcend borders, they become increasingly adept at multicultural identify shifting, including practices that might be described metaphorically as "passing," "cross-dressing," and "outing." R.C. Burns (1993) speaks of parents moving from the traditional roles of audience, home tutor, and school program supporters to co-learner (parents attend workshops and conferences with school staff, take part in staff development, and attend educational activities for parents), advocate (parents take part in school board meetings, speak at faculty meetings, initiate new programs, and offer ideas), and decision-maker (parents help evaluate how well school programs work, help decide school budget expenditures, and collaborate in developing school and district policies and programs).

Passing is a common occurrence in Westside, and at Rainbow School. Professors of Education attend parent meetings and work as parents in classrooms and volunteer programs. Teachers act as professionals despite their own simultaneous experiences as parents in the community. An advocate for special conflict resolution curricula speaks at a meeting in favor of individualized mathematics instruction. Yet any or all of these actors may enter an event under one rubric, such as concerned parent, take on a role such as "energizer hour facilitator," and then end up teaching in the classroom along with a paid teacher. Or an administrator may tell stories in a memo home about his or her own family, clothing the self in a dress of family representative or citizen, only to do so in order to pursue a longer term goal as administrator. But the identity politics is often far more complex. An administrator may voice disagreement in the role of administrator in order to promote a perspective identified as racially motivated, for reasons that have little to do with the issue but instead with an administrative goal. A parent newsletter editor may raise an issue about the social curriculum at a School Review meeting because of an incident that occurred during a mathematics lesson in her daughter's class, an incident that she finds problematic only because of her knowledge about alternative classroom discipline strategies from her own professional work as a media educator. These latter cases are examples of cross-dressing.

I personally experienced outing in a variety of contexts in my four years of study. In my early participant observation as a parent in Rainbow School, my interest in mathematics and science curricula led to my being identified as interested more because of my identity as a mathematics educator rather than my concerns about outdated texts and inconsistent professional development in the areas of mathematics as a parent and community member. Yet months later, my offer to participate as a mathematics educator with expertise to offer was represented as a parental interest in district and school curriculum, which in turn raised anxieties among district administrators about a parent being intimately involved in the private world of professional development. An invitation from a new teacher at the high school to collaborate on the teaching of remedial mathematics classes was interpreted by the department chair and principal as a request from a community member and thus more appropriately undertaken by my volunteering to tutor students after school rather than working in the classroom with an inexperienced teacher. And pleas at numerous board of education meetings for the district not to eliminate its outstanding pre-kindergarten program, and accompanying documentation of the long term financial and pedagogical gains of such programs, were offered in my own words as coming from a member of the community committed to integrated, innovative schools; these same arguments and documentation were dismissed in some weeks as the cries of a parent of a potential pre-K child, in other weeks as the bravura of a free-spending educrat professor. Such outing tactics are key indicators of power relationships in the community since the ability to "out" enables an individual or group to define the discourse.

The common sense approaches to family involvement and forms of constituency or cultural border crossings pose the notion that power can be shared. They rely on the idea that power is held and can be wielded or distributed in different ways. By proposing a vision of shared power, barriers to the vision, and techniques for surmounting the barriers and moving toward the vision, they create a conceivable notion of "progress" to which individuals can devote professional or lay practice. Sometimes framed as "equal status contact theory," (E.S.C.T.) these approaches to family involvement share key attributes with contemporary standpoints on integration. Fine, Weis, and Powell (1997) summarize E.S.C.T. for educators as follows: 1)Equal Status -- the content of discussion should occur in circumstances that place the groups in equal status; 2) Personal Interaction -- the content of discussion or action should involve one-on-one interactions among individual members of groups; 3) Cooperative Activities -- Members of different groups should join together to admire superordinate goals; and 4) Social Norms -- the social norms defined in part by relevant authorities should favor intergroup contact. As I see it, E.S.C.T. is an attempt to undermine hierarchy. Interventions are directed at dismantling, defeating, or declaring guerilla war upon hierarchic relations. This constitutes metaphorical terrorism against the scientific management of schooling. Education of administrators and teachers would be in effect an initial form of intellectual terrorism (Appelbaum 1995; Foucault 1980) that blows up the conceptual bridges of common sense discourse in order to build new pathways of collaboration out of the conceptual rubble.

Here in this space I want to suggest another approach that may be more optimistic and doable. I believe we can reconceptualize family involvement by using a tactic initiated by Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari (1987) -- by attempting a "nomadic epistemology" we shift our discourse to one that is perpendicular to, or linearly independent and thus circumventing of, hierarchy. The classic Deleuzian example of this is in an architectural context: instead of setting up a dichotomy between the sheltered and the homeless, we speak of nomads who are neither and both.

Passing, Cross-dressing, and Outing point to the weaknesses of essentialized constituencies and reified cultures. The "reality," if there is one, is more of a multidimensional and multilayered weaving of identity, rich in complexity and shifting patterns, of identity and location in the cultures. Events that take place do so as the ongoing construction of these multiply-stranded identities.[4] Indeed, if we were to try to map out the time-line of family involvement in a community (and believe me, I have tried) it would end up violating our preconceived notions of time as linear, and, I argue here, our preconceived notions of constituencies and membership in cultures. Deleuze (1993) is potentially helpful. Start first with a picture of a piece of cloth -- already woven of different strands of identity. Now imagine the cloth creased, folded, and refolded upon itself so that some points are points of intersection and others are interstices. Two points previously far apart are instantly brought together as immediate. On the other hand, a ripped piece of cloth spontaneously forces two adjacent points to be disconnected. Then the cloth can be sewn back together, ironed, and so on, only to displace or relocate a collection of points again. Events and identities are multitemporal, multipositional, and constantly shifting, eluding our grasp or jumping into our vision. Yet locally, as with any topology, we can isolate a Euclidean metric that approximates a linear and categorical measurement.

Another good picture is thanks to Donna Haraway (1989): Cat's Cradle. Cat's cradle string figures can be passed back and forth on the hands of several players, who add new moves in the building of complex patterns. Cat's cradle invites a sense of collective work, of one person not being able to make all the patterns alone. ... It is not always possible to repeat interesting patterns, and figuring out what happened to result in intriguing patterns is an embodied analytical skill. (p.11) In other words, cats cradle is a serious game about complex, collaborative processes for making and passing on culturally interesting patterns. In using cat’s cradle as a metaphor for what we observe in family involvement, we seek to understand the processes of constitution and unraveling of diverse, fragmented cultures.[5]

Community, Difference, Democracy

If people act as members of constituencies, and if we theorize them as such, then I believe there is little hope for equal status contact theory, because focus groups do just what their name implies: they focus the group on a group purpose, a group interest. This is Henry's and Peshkin's keen insight as ethnographers. And this is also Fine, Weis, and Powell's interest in why "technically desegregated" communities corrode into sites of oppositional identities, racial tensions, and fractured group relations simply mirroring the larger society. Perpendicular to, or, more precisely, linearly independent of equal status contact theory, lies folding pieces of, or looping and twisting strands of three ideas that form a framework that Fine, Weis and Powell have found useful: community, difference, and democracy. What would family involvement in mathematics education sound and read like, emerge like, if the framework for theory and practice at all levels articulated a belief in community? And what if that community were committed to the creative analysis of difference, with an enduring investment in democracy?

The recently established TMAD project, Teaching Mathematics for American Democracy, facilitated by a Michigan teacher, Jeff Bohl, may be a place to look for this heterarchic projection, as it begins to define for itself its own notion of democracy and mathematics education for democracy[6].

Leadership, Voice, Participation

What if the most recent version of the Principles and Standards (NCTM 2001) of the National Council of Teachers of Mathematics, instead of casually mentioning parents as appendages, promulgated community, difference, and democracy in the service of youth leadership, voice, and participation? These are three more heterarchic terms from Fine, Weis, and Powell that can be understood as movements (not objects) that form dialogic relationships with all oppositions emerging out of equal status contact theory, three points of intersection in a folded cloth, three possible string figures woven out of constituency groups. The focus on the possible, on the potential, is what I think this approach can offer to other important work in family involvement in mathematics education, because, as Michael Menser (1996) writes, "heterarchy constructs spaces that make possible effects or emergent properties instead of signification bound to an abstract regime of overcoding characteristic of the state and its cohorts." So, instead of trying to have a revolution, and overthrow the regime of truth, we might, along with Deleuze and Guattari, think about dis-placing (literally robbing it of its place), as individuals traverse multiple divides. Youth leadership in mathematics, voice in mathematics education, and participation in the difficult practice of democratic community seems to me to offer this very potential.

Here is a thought experiment to consider in developing our notions of possibility:

“Heterarchic Community School” is reconsidering its mathematics curriculum. Faculty, students, parents, and community members are no longer satisfied with recent attempts at reorganizing the curriculum, and are searching for new ideas. Common in the past several years were Family Math nights, very popular with the families of younger students, but lacking in continued zip for those who have attended two or three of these. The annual Math Carnival during Math Awareness Month (April!) is a consistently successful PTO event, but the student projects showcased don't have the pedagogical impact they deserve, since families tend to check out their own members' projects, play the games, buy some food, and socialize, never getting around to studying and carefully analyzing the themes of other students' projects. The weekly Math Talks that have been scheduled as an option for any student, family member, staff member, or community member, during the last cycle of Friday activities during the year, seem to need more expert facilitation even as they continue to promise potential. Math-related events are difficult to schedule since there are so many other groups attempting to move their agenda to the forefront. Most of the people recently involved in math event planning are becoming more concerned with the lack of attention to conflict resolution in the curriculum; others have asked why this is perceived as a competing interest. The math-team, a collection of teachers, administrators, citizens, students, and some volunteers from a senior center in another state who participate by e-mail, is about to establish its meeting agenda. They photocopy a recent article (Gutiérrez 1999) on how teacher collectivities can influence teachers' abilities to develop meaningful relationships with students and advance them in mathematics.

Difference, Disparity, Desire

In some ways leadership, voice and participation have a mostly social quality in that they are not necessarily adept at helping us hop from the macro to the micro in our theorizing and analysis. I think we can get at this with another set of heterarchies, including disparity and desire. Here I am pointing to a theoretically important distinction between "difference" (meaning "not-same") and "disparity" (meaning "unequal in difference"). Sharon Todd (1997), who helps me work through this, writes that

... difference and disparity go hand in hand as conceptual tools, for without maintaining a notion of disparity in the material conditions that structure differences differently, difference can -- and often does -- collapse into an individualized and psychologistic rendering of what is often labeled "diversity." (p.240)

In struggling against disparities of injustice, she continues, desires are produced, mobilized, and frustrated in the pedagogical encounter with difference. Examples from the Westside case-study district bring this to the forefront. One parent speaks to the principal, expressing concern that her child might be absent during a Century quiz, and then feel like a failure for not making it into the club. Another asks the principal if she has considered what the message is for the students who will never make it into the club. Why am I silent when I know the principal thinks this parent is afraid that her child will not make it into the club, yet I also know that the parent is mostly concerned that her child will spurn non-club members as potential friends, and is trying to make a point about the ways in which the school inappropriately labels children as "good" or "bad"? A parent says her son is "smarter because he's working harder" now that he wants to get more than seven out of ten on the next quizzes; he's set up his own standard of improvement independent of the "club." Yet another asks if the club party will involve pizza; she needs to know because her daughter is lactose intolerant and uncomfortable about calling attention to it in public. Do I feel comfortable asking about the lack of attention to Standards-based mathematics education practices? The local paper last week had a front page article; the superintendent wants to stop doing the MAT tests, citing lack of fit with the district and the new state assessments. Of course, he promises to find a better alternative that continues the practice of yearly testing. At parent night, nobody signs up to work in Mrs. Miller's classroom on Friday mornings, the time she has noted as "math." Mrs. Stevens doesn't provide the option of parents working in the classroom during math time. Am I comfortable asking why there is a specific math time, if I can help people brainstorm math throughout their thematic units that are currently bridging language arts, science and social studies? I re-read Sharon Todd, on how desire is that which ceaselessly circulates through the unsaid, manifesting itself in expectations, hopes, visions, fears, even as it intersects with the symbolic and spoken discourses uttered by teacher and student alike. Deleuze tells me "desire never needs interpreting, it is it which experiments." (Boundas 1993, p.136) Todd (1997, p. 239) writes, desires are "not only 'handled' or 'dealt with,' but ... [are] also produced and constituted."

Cultural Workers

The "real" that's out there, the unsaid, indicates, in Alberto Rodriguez's (1999) words, that being called cultural workers is not enough.[7] We must become cultural warriors for social change:

· The continuation of pervasive gaps in student achievement (National Science Foundation, 1996; Third International Math and Science Study, 2000; Schmidt, 1998).

· The consistent gender differences in participation in science, engineering, mathematics, and technology-related fields (National Science Foundation, 1996, American Association of University Women, 2000).

· The consistently high drop-out rate of Latina/os for the past 26 years (Secada et al., 1998).

· A persistent discourse of mathematics education that leaves unsaid the cultural context of Western mathematics, the politics of mathematics education, and the potential for mathematical experience to reconstruct meaning in the lives of students and teachers (Appelbaum 1995, 1999).

· A professional program in mathematics education that denies a voice for equity (Secada 1995).

Here we have disparities to talk about with and in our families. Yet heterarchic interpretations reframe cultural warriors in new ways. Rather than passing, cross dressing or outing, heterarchic interpretations call for recognition of difference, diversity and desire as outcomes of events instead of causal origins of entrenched problems. In doing so, they open up a field of possibilities for coalitions and multiple levels of possibility that cut across the lines of difference and power. A nomadic epistemology preserves "home" in a culture and shifting multiple cultural locations; nomadic epistemology is an event of theorizing. Rather than standpoints, the above disparities are enunciations.

Being an other[8] -- the assumptions that set up such a unifying concept of identity -- remains intact, despite the recognition of the constructed new, and mutable, difference. Joan Scott once wrote that "diversity" represents a plurality of identities, and that we should watch out! She suggests that we cease viewing diversity as a condition of human existence, rather than as the effect of an enunciation of difference. She posited that this enunciation constitutes hierarchies and asymmetries of power. I feel like regimes of truth (Peressini 1996, 1997) are definitely "real;" they are real inasmuch as common sense is real -- they become reality through action (Deleuze and Guattari, 1987). Yet heterarchies are there and are dislocating the fixity of hierarchy so that no heterarch fashions the "real," and all heterarchs assemble what they have "on site." [9] It is certainly possible to study how people in different social locations define the possibilities for localized social movements, and how they see the potential threat of greater inequality resulting from this reform in and among communities; the point is not to definitively state whether or not a particular reform is "working" or whether it is leading to greater social stratification across broad categories of difference, but to see that in any local situation modern identities and postmodern multiplicities of identity converge and in doing so provide the context for heterarchic interpretation (Wells et al. 1999).

In my case-study district, a local activist/educator known for her successes in navigating the politics of the district recently met with a collection of disgruntled parents to help them strategize. Her wisdom, of course, was to reframe the question. Putting aside issues of power and hierarchy, she cleverly helped parents identify the ways their goals would solve the superintendent's problems. She further helped these parents identify the teachers whose visions would be re-energized by the support of the parents, and other parent constituencies whose issues overlapped with this group. What the activist did was travel through the hierarchies heterarchically, using local issues, local institutions, local resources, and local actors. As a heterarch she avoided existing hierarchies and savored the differences and identities in-between the lines of power.

homi bhaba (1994) entices us to rethink the relationship between identity and difference by considering the space "in-between."

What is at issue is the performative nature of differentiated identities: the regulation and negotiation of those spaces that are continually, contingently, 'opening out', remaking the boundaries, exposing the limits of any claim to a singular or autonomous sign of difference -- be it class, gender, or race. Such assignations of social differences -- where difference is neither One nor the Other but something else besides, in-between -- find their agency in a form of the 'future' where the past is not originary, where the present is not simply transitory. It is, if I may stretch a point, an interstitial future, that emerges in-between the claims of the past and the needs of the present. (p. 219)

We can clutch the cloth or the string figure: the future is in a sense once again open, in that the "heterarchic identity" has available to it a mode of performativity, a way of enunciating by connecting almost any collection of points through folding creatively.[10] In using heterarchic ideas to think about family involvement, new heterarchic forms of school governance, family participation, and curricular reform are available as options to be considered. In offering such possibilities for consideration, I am, finally, recommending that we seize the opportunity and take these options.

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