Resistance In/Of the Classroom

Referencing the Egyptian Revolution, by artist Graphic Resistance, 2011 <http://graphic-resistance.deviantart.com/>

Plenty of research has been published on resistance of/by students within the classroom, especially within the writing classroom. A brief, incomplete, bibliography:

Carter, Christopher. Rhetoric and resistance in the corporate academy. Hampton Pr, 2008. 

Corkery, Caleb. "Rhetoric of Race: Critical Pedagogy without Resistance." Teaching English in the Two-Year College 36.3 (2009): 244-256. 

Flowerdew, John. "13 Critical discourse analysis and strategies of resistance." Advances in discourse studies (2008): 195. 

Gorzelsky, Gwen. "Working boundaries: From student resistance to student agency." College Composition and Communication (2009): 64-84. 

Palmerino, Gregory. "Opinion: Teaching Bartleby to Write--Passive Resistance and Technology's Place in the Composition Classroom." College English 73.3 (2011): 283-302. 

Shor, Ira. When students have power: Negotiating authority in a critical pedagogy. University of Chicago Press, 1996.

When I do note resistance by students, it's often within the first few weeks of school when they think they've walked into a bad B-horror movie remake of English IV from high school, where they will be forced to re-read Romeo and Juliet, recognize iambic pentameter, and reply to insulting, condescending TAKS/STAAR writing questions such as:

Xavier would like to improve the closing paragraph (sentences 27–32) by replacing sentence 32. Which of the following could best replace sentence 32 and help strengthen this paper’s closing?

or

What change should be made in sentence 15?
F Insert a comma after Buntline
G Change made to making
H Change their to his
J No change should be made.  

and essay prompts such as

Think carefully about the following statement.
 According to Dr. Seuss, knowledge leads to new opportunities.
Write an essay stating your position on whether learning always has a positive effect on a person’s life.

[Do I need to remind the loyal reader that Pearson [codename Wormwood] is the ultimate author of these standardized tests, as well as all the learning materials for K-12 in Texas to prepare for these tests, as well as one of the largest lobbyist in Texas? And that when Texas chooses its textbooks, so many other states are then forced to purchase the same overpriced under-utilized textbooks because of Pearson's marketing plan? We're talking tens of billions of dollars for a British company. Not that I have anything against the British, per se (but remember to VOTE YES FOR SCOTTISH INDEPENDENCE)].

So with writing preparation like this, it's perhaps not surprising that students will think they're in for another 15 weeks of "correct" grammar instruction and "correct" language rules. Student resistance is tricky, but after a while, most students warm up and become engaged.

What's more troublesome is the resistance by faculty to anything that might approach an understanding of students as humans, with fears and misunderstandings and different socio-economic backgrounds, different interests in language, and coming from Texas schools with those writing standards, above. Some faculty resist change for many reasons, including lack of preparation, fear, apathy, lack of a learning commons at the college, lack of communication within a discipline, etc. There's the long friction between literaturists and compositionists, and I'm not going to get into that here.

But sometimes faculty resist just because they are petty -- small-hearted, small-minded Grinches who have grown cold with a resistance not of learning best teaching practices, but because they somehow have learned to fear the student and create walls of mistrust and false security. This semester, I've already run into a) a student whose professor is still administering an archaic "English Proficiency Exam" which at one time was mandatory for all FYW courses and which determined whether a student could remain in the course or needed to be "kicked back" to developmental writing. The EPE is essentially a middle class gatekeeping instrument which tells students of working class backgrounds that their language is unacceptable; that African American Vernacular English is unacceptable; that Spanglish and any variant is unacceptable in our college, in our nation, in our discourse. It's humiliating and demeaning and degrading and I refused to administer it years ago and am glad I did. That's the topic for another posting.

What's more indicative of the fear of faculty of their own students are these 12-page syllabi I find left over in classrooms when I come in -- left by some student or students who know after 48 minutes that they can't possibly succeed in that writing course because within those 12 pages of rules and boundaries meant not to create a mutually respectful environment of collegiality and scholarship, but one of suppression and authority, excluding not only variance and diversity, but also critical andragogy which can demonstrate the power of language to students so that they not only change the way they understand the world, but change the way we understand the world.

Slate recently has written about these syllabi which are out of control. In her "Syllabus Tyrannus," Rebecca Schuman accurately describes the encroachment of the syllabus to control the classroom, once seen as a guide to the course's philosophy into now what some academics call the course contract. To come to this tyranny, Schuman follows four trends in the downfall of the Academy:

1. The helicopter generation felt they were privileged and deserved the easy A
2. The syllabus went from print to on-line [I disagree with her on this, since most of my colleagues don't know how to upload documents to our LMS]
3. The rise of the adjunct faculty meant that unprepared contingent instructors copy/pasted/amended others' documents
4. The advent of the corporate university, administrators with little/no teaching experience, running colleges as if they were for-profit corporations. 

This corporatized document, however, is almost never actually read by our students, especially FTIC students who have never been exposed to the genre and don't know what to do with one. 

The problem, however, when it comes to the genre as a form of resistance by faculty, is that these faculty use the document to control students, instead of liberating. Sample "rules" I've seen this semester on syllabus include:

1. No phones
2. No laptops
3. No offensive language 
4. No tardies
5. No disruptive behavior
6. No late acceptances
7. No revisions
8. No offensive clothing
9. Extended, detailed requirements for the student's binder, costing the student $41. Forty-one dollars just for the freakin' binder.

[Query: will these professor also prohibit the new smart watches? Does redesigning a technology to mimic an "acceptable" one a century old make it finally tolerable?]

The iWatch, 2014

On the other end, Kris Shaffer on Hybrid Pedagogy, in "Three Lines of Resistance: Ethics, Critical Pedagogy, and Teaching Underground" takes the liberatory position that I try to emulate:

1. Calling for institutional change that empowers the student instead of the administrators
2. Enacting personal, below-the-radar changes which benefit the student's position and experience in spite of the institution
3. Employ "assessment practices in class that focus on formative assessment and verbal feedback over summative assessment and final grades" -- instead of punishing the student because of her experience and background, finding ways of using assessment as the teaching moment. 

This last item has, for me, created more colleagues in my community college among the students than it has created a workforce among the students. I'm grateful that I can look a student in the eye a semester or two later and have a long talk about what's important to him now instead of having flunked him because his phone rang one day or he wore his pants down too low or because he didn't have all the tabs correct in his binder or because he had one too many run-on sentences. 

I've got a way to go before I feel I'm effective in mentoring other adults to be critically thinking/writing citizens, but at least I feel I'm doing something right when a student doesn't tell my professional colleagues -- as I heard one tell me this month -- that I made him cry -- twice -- because his sentences weren't up to my middle class standards.

Before we criticize students for being disengaged in learning, I need to check my privilege and ensure I'm not disengaged from learning as well.

Be strong, and courageous.
Dixi et salvavi animam meam
Google +
Twitter @comstone
Professional Blog