Student Resistance to Authoritarianism
I could also call this “How to Share the Power with Students,” but both titles are pretty cheesy. However, these ideas have proved very helpful for several colleagues and me. Drop a line if you have any more suggestions!
During their entire education experience prior to college, your students were probably forced to attend classes they neither chose nor necessarily liked—both by legal mandate and parental coercion. Since they had no official “say,” these students made use of a number of strategies to assert their personal agency in classrooms, usually amounting to blocking the teacher from teaching the lesson in any way possible. Do you remember doing this when you were in high school? Pretending not to understand assignments, moving desks into a circle v e r y s l o w l y , lying to substitutes about the class work left by the teacher, praying for fire drills, blessing the movie days, and so on?
Now that they’re in college, your students actually get a choice in the matter! They can choose most of their classes and even choose whether to attend or sleep in. The resulting difference in student attitude, I find, is that high school students automatically disrespect the teacher because he or she is the authority, and college students automatically respect the teacher because the students feel more personal authority in that situation.
However, sometimes you might still run into student resistance in college courses—especially if you're teaching a required general course like freshman comp or Math 101—but not really be able to put your finger on it. Maybe you feel like you can’t get through to the group, or that you’re a bad teacher. Maybe you're disappointed with the discussions or you even sense rudeness or disdain sometimes. Classroom problems can originate from a number of causes, of course—maybe you don’t care about the class and the students are picking up on it—but problems may also arise because students feel that you the teacher are too controlling. Maybe they think you dominate the discussions too much, that you’re not truly asking for their answers/opinions, but are instead searching for a specific answer that’s hidden in your brain (have you been on the other end of this with any of your teachers or profs? frustrating). Or maybe they feel your attendance policy is overly strict, but they don’t feel comfortable talking to you about it. And then again, maybe they have nothing against you; they’re simply required to take your lower-level General Education course, and they’re determined that the system can have their bodies but not their souls.
In any case, the result is that you’re the only one who wants to accomplish your agenda, and you’re sorely outnumbered by very intelligent and even crafty adults who are prepared to protect their right to choose what they learn.
Forms of Student Resistance
Everything amounts to “gunking up the works”—keeping teaching from happening. Here are some forms of general resistance I’ve compiled from a few studies that sometimes deal with pretty intense forms of subjugation, but can be applied to your class as well.
From James C. Scott’s Domination and the Arts of Resistance: The Hidden Transcript:
- silence (you know those moments after you ask a discussion Q?)
- lying (about homework or even about being happy with the class)
- venting to other students (instead of talking to the teacher)
- rumors/gossip (snickering during class discussions and talking over the teacher)
- daydreaming/fantasizing about being out of class (the window gazers, and sometimes even the students who are looking straight at you)
From Ira Shor’s Empowering Education: Critical Teaching for Social Change:
- playing dumb (claiming to have read the wrong chapter, asking too many questions, etc.)
- getting by (slacking till the end of the semester, then begging for extra credit)
- cutting class (Shor includes this one, but I personally prefer a student cutting class over attending with a bad attitude)
How to Avoid It
1. Only teach students who want to be taught. Make sure you don’t overstep your boundaries; know what you can expect of yourself and your students—after all, they just might be justified in resisting your attempts to control them! It is the student’s right to choose whether he or she wants to learn what you’re teaching or fail the course. It is never acceptable for us to force someone to learn something, even if we know it will be beneficial in the long run. As I’ve written before about students who choose to plagiarize or fail, we as teachers do not have the right to cheat students of learning from their mistakes (though, like anyone else, I make exceptions with discretion). What you do have the right to is a healthy teaching and learning environment; you can require students to leave their attitudes outside the class or take themselves outside the class.
My personal mantra for these situations is “I will only teach students who want to be taught.” I announce early on and remind my students often that if I sense that someone doesn’t want to be taught by me, I ask him or her to leave. Yes, I’ve done this several times—I simply tell the student (who is sleeping or sassing or continually talking over me) that he or she doesn’t seem to want to be taught by me that day and is welcome to come back when he or she does want it, but goodbye for today. They’ve always come back with apologies.
Your job is to teach, not to make students learn. Check your expectations of yourself.
2. Immediately put the work of learning in your students’ corner. Acknowledge that they are capable adults who are responsible for achieving the grade they choose. I like to give a talk like this on one of the introductory days:
· First, as much as I would like to believe otherwise, I understand that my class is not the most important thing in the world. Families and jobs sometimes take precedence, and that’s why I give them a certain number of absences right off the bat.
· Next, I tell them they’re free to do anything they want in my class, as long as they’re prepared to accept the consequences—a low grade for poor work or too many absences, a look of disbelief from the teacher if they walk out in the middle of class, whatever.
· Kindergarteners learn when they’re entertained, but adults learn only if they choose to. In other words, no teacher can finagle or trick adult students into learning something they don’t want to learn. In fact, no teacher can stop students from learning either, not with the internet, libraries, Amazon.com, and so on. (In addition—for all composition teachers reading this—Patrick Hartwell argues that grammar cannot be taught in “Grammar, Grammars and the Teaching of Grammar.”) I acknowledge this and I tell students that they get to learn as much as they want and, while I want them to aim for an A, they’re free to choose any grade they desire, and it won’t hurt my feelings. This may not be kosher, but I also encourage students to drop my class and sign up for a different section if they don’t like my policies (or, heaven forbid, me), because that’s a part of their right to choose.
· Finally, I teach the list of forms of student resistance right away. I let them know I’m aware of how much power they have in the classroom and, since I respect their decision either to excel or fail, I ask that they respect my teaching time if they choose to stay in my class and attend.
3. Give students a chance to talk back. Usually, we only find out what worked or what flopped when we receive our student evaluations a semester later, and by then it’s too late to augment the class. Ensure dialogue between you and your students for something closer to a democratic education experience (I recommend Paulo Freire’s Pedagogy of the Oppressed for more on this), and learn from what they’re telling you. Here are a couple things I’ve tried and liked a lot (and students have told me they like these practices because they’ve never had a chance to explain themselves or answer the teacher):
· When I hand back papers, I have the students circle any of my comments that may be illegible or unclear in a different colored ink and respond to any questions I asked on their paper or defend their grammatical or stylistic choices.
· I also hold regular in-class 5-minute conferences (about once every two weeks) to touch base with students in a seat near my desk while everyone works quietly on in-class essays. I love this practice! I try to have a conference for major papers and revisions, in which case I ask questions like “Do you feel like you understand the assignment?” and “Do you understand the comments I made on your draft?”
· I have students write “cover letters” to me when they hand in papers; I imagine you can do something like this for tests too. They usually answer 4 questions:
- What do you think is the strongest part of this paper?
- What do you think was weakest?
- What grade do you expect and why?
- Any last words?
4. Give students a say in the syllabus:
· When you have a choice in your curriculum, let the students vote on what they want. Or if you really don’t care how much homework versus participation is worth, let them vote on the percentages. Or take a bigger risk and let them vote on things you do care about!
· I recommend the grading contract (email me and I'll be happy to send you a copy) I’ve adapted from Ira Shor. Ask them to make revisions to the contract before they sign it.
· Shor also writes about offering students “protest rights” when the material gets too boring or seemingly pointless in exchange for required attendance (see When Students Have Power: Negotiating Authority in a Critical Pedagogy).
One of my own experiences:
I encountered some of these forms of resistance when I taught an English 101 block-scheduled class who traveled from course to course with one another everyday. In other words, they were living the high school experience, and they acted like it; in fact, they were calling it the “thirteenth grade.” The students were shockingly disrespectful in class, talking over me to one another, chuckling over whispered jokes, and staring out at me from behind folded arms much of the time. The implicit accusation was that I was forcing them to be there, but they were going to show me that they didn’t have to enjoy it. I left everyday for the first 4 weeks feeling completely demoralized! I’d already been teaching for 10 years, but I couldn’t figure out why the particularly resistant ones wouldn’t just drop the class—or at least skip a few! Then I found out their scholarships stipulated a certain schedule with no leeway and even monitored their attendance, so they were rightly upset about their limited options, but taking it out on the wrong person—me.
In my case, it was enough simply to teach the modes of student resistance and offer them a chance to address the persons who could do something about their situation—that is, a chance to problem-solve instead of accept their circumstances. First, I wrote a list of the forms of resistance on the board and began to point out some examples I’d seen in class. “This tells me,” I told them, “that you feel you don’t have a say in what happens in this class, when I actually am hoping for much more feedback with which I can shape the course.” I don’t know if that’s the magic formula—I certainly wasn’t expecting it to change all that much—but when I went over those forms of student resistance again in the next class, I got the best student participation I’d ever had. They knew that I knew that they knew what they were doing when they pretended they couldn’t answer my questions; our next discussion was very peopled! Next, I had them write persuasive business letters to the administrators of their program for their next major writing assignment. They had to research their program, review the contracts they had signed, find the best contact, and write a polite but persuasive letter requesting that they be allowed to choose their own schedules, classes and teachers. After that, the rapport between the students and me changed for the (much) better.
It takes a lot of honesty and self-criticism to keep from getting defensive in the face of student resistance, but it’s worth it.
