I see it every semester as a teacher: rules don't help cultivate a positive learning environment. Grades don't help. The best classrooms may have rubrics, scaffolding, needs assessment, and modeling from teachers and individual and group participation from students, but those classes don't focus on rules and grades. The best classrooms in which I've been a member have always thrived through association independent of institutional status because the best classes are constructed with high-interest course materials and cooperating individual members; they are focused on specific objectives that benefit all involved.
I find that rules become easily confused with class objectives. I weekly reinforce practical objectives in classes to remind myself and students that we're skills-building rather than cultivating power and status. This habit is an important part of my pedagogy.
I find the same trend in other communities in which I cooperate. The more rule-burdened they are, the less interested and useful they become for all members. Rules insist on less social difference in problematic ways. Rules presuppose problematic similarity among community members. Rule-burdened associations compose a pre-determined set of states of being and assumptions about status in which individuals illustrate social difference. Social difference is illustrated according to evaluations and performances that don't relate to who we are outside the spaces rules dominate.
In rule-burdened spaces, a focus on fairness becomes a means to insist we are already the same. Consensus, thus, becomes about coordinating rules and status more than seeking a means to positively use the conflict social difference presents us as a tool for productivity.
