In CULTURE WARS: SCHOOL AND SOCIETY IN THE CONSERVATIVE RESTORATION, Ira Shor writes the following:
"Students will resist any process that disempowers them. Unequal, disabling education is symbolic violence against them, which they answer with their own skills of resistance--silence, disruption, non-performance, cheating, lateness, absence, vandalisim, etc. Very familiar school routines produce this alienation: teacher-talk, passive instruction in pre-set materials, punitive testing, moronic back-to-basics and mechanical drills, impersonal and shabby classrooms, tracking, the denial of sexual themes and other subjects important to them, the exclusion of student co-participation in curriculum design and governance, and the outlawing of popular idioms in favor of correct usage" (183).
A lot of composition theorist (particularly critical pedagogues) make these sorts of claims. They tell us that student resistance is rooted in the oppressive nature of teacher-oriented education. And I suppose that this argument makes sense, but it doesn't answer for why teachers who enact student-centered classrooms are also met with resistance. I wonder if it's not just an issue of youthful rebellion. No matter what your pedagogy--whether you downplay your authority or not--students will always view teachers as authorities and many of them will rebel accordingly.
3 comments:
Very good question, Oxymoron. I am also struggling with this question at the same time that I am concerned about the student of our colleague informing her that he is HER employer, deliberately trying to remove the authority that she has as his teacher. It could also be a rebellion against the larger institution--students often complain about the required courses that they do not value themselves but that they are told by the powers that be to take or they don't graduate, going in to the class with an adversarial (second time I've used that word today!) attitude.
How do we as teachers address this resistance that was there before class ever started?
Oxymoron-
In Ira Shor's work, Who are the students in question? Elementary school students, high school students, or college students?
What type of education? Liberal arts? Illiberal arts, I mean, business? the Hard Sciences? Law? Medical School?
Is it fair to extend Ira's democratic theory of education to all disciplines? (If it is in the humanities?)
Is the "symbolic violence" metaphor a little excessive?
Is this just a problem with the humanities?
Maybe the rebellion that Oxymoron discusses and the apathy that Sarah discusses is our fault, especially since we do not stress to our students why our subject material is important to the them and since a good portion of society seems to lack interest in the humanities-- (think of the phrase, "It all academic now" as if the even or thought does not matter in the real world.) Maybe we rely on that argument from authority (take it because we tell you to take it) without trying to justify the material in any other way. I do not think the combination of democracy and education works, especially with the imbalance of knowledge-- if the students possessed the knowledge in the first place, why would they be in school? A better guiding principle may be democracy through education, but not democracy and education.
As far as the student as "employer" metaphor, were he to say that to me in person, I would say, ("funny, my paycheck says a large mid-western university,") I mean, try to make this a teachable moment on the dangers of correlating education and econmics.
In that specific case, I think the problem there is the lack of a personal interface. The student would not be that disrespectful in person since the prof. would kick him out of class. This incident may represent a larger problem with online learning but, more importantly, the student as consumer or educaiton as consumption metaphor. The second problem is much worse than the first even though it may be unpreventable. Just think: if the rest of society speaks uses terministic screens of capitalism (supply/ demand, free markets, customer is correct), then how can education work if it relies on another set of terministic screens (teacher's authority, teacher possesses more knowledge).
I admittedly have not read the pedagogical theory that Oxymoron has, but my concept of student-centered or "democratic" learning is not that the students already possess the knowledge but that students should be responsible for creating knowledge--I don't know if that's the right word either, but I'll use it for now. What I mean is students actively seeking out and coming to understanding with the direction of a teacher as opposed to a teacher lecturing to a class of what I see as passive learners. The seminar model as opposed to the lecture, in a way.
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