The title of this chapter intrigued me, because on the whole I feel I have not encountered much resistance to learning in my teaching career. This may be because I work at a community college, where the median student age is 32, and returning to school is a conscious choice. Though these students are balancing jobs, families, and other commitments, they are highly motivated learners. The smaller class sizes at community college also facilitate greater insight into individual students’ learning styles, and more face time with which to address them. That being said, I probably encounter at least one or two students displaying signs of resistance every year.

Brookfield’s honest assessment of his own experiences as a resistant learner made me reflect on where I myself have been a resistant student. I have taken several language courses over the years, and have often marveled at how much the teacher’s personality has set the tone for how easy I find the language. I have felt motivated by one teacher who was funny, high-energy, and positive, and resistant towards another who was sullen and didn’t seem to be enjoying themselves at all.

As Brookfield explains, “[r]esistance is a multilayered and complex phenomenon in which several factors intersect” (2015, 219). I agree that there are many different flavours of resistance that teachers may encounter. All are valid, and have nothing to do with the oft-repeated adage that “people just don’t have attention spans these days”. As I mentioned in the previous blog post about teaching in diverse classrooms, I am currently taking steps to minimize the “disjunction of learning and teaching styles” (220) by using a variety of different methods that appeal to a broader range of learners. But the style that stood out the most to me from Brookfield’s list was “cultural suicide”, wherein students belonging to specific identity groups can experience a sense of betrayal from their community through the act of going to school and being exposed to contradictory ideas (223).

Here is Brookfield’s quote in full:

“I have seen this dynamic with working class students for whom taking education seriously (i.e., demonstrating interest in ideas for their own sake rather than as a source of future income) is taken by some of their peers as a betrayal of solid, unpretentious working class values. I have seen it in fundamentalist groups for whom a member’s consenting exposure to new ideas is regarded as tantamount to blasphemy. I have also seen it in racial groups in which a commitment to study is seen as indicating that people have joined the dominant White supremacist culture. In all these situations students’ resistance to learning springs from the fear of committing cultural suicide.” (223)

“Cultural suicide” was not a term I was very familiar with, at least not in the pedagogical sense. It is, however, a term that I have heard used by white supremacist groups to bemoan their governments supporting immigration. I had always considered it to be a conservative or far-right concept of cultural purity and protectionism, inextricably linked to ideas about the sanctity of a dominant white race. News articles like this confirm the reality and prevalence of this narrative in Canadian society. Seeing it used in Brookfield’s sense, to highlight the betrayal, cognitive dissonance, and very real and devastating consequences of possible social and even familial exclusion, brought another dimension to the term for me.

https://www.researchgate.net/figure/Cultural-betrayal-trauma-theory-reprinted-with-permission_fig3_326385780

Further research revealed that this concept is closely related to Cultural Betrayal Trauma Theory from the field of psychology. I found the above diagram, from Gómez and Johnson-Freyd (2018) very useful in fleshing this out further. Understanding that for some students, learning is simply broadening their horizons, while for others, it is requiring them to confront intense in-group pressures, is a crucial thing for educators to keep in mind when encountering resistance to their teaching. It may be about something much bigger than we realize, and compassion and sensitivity are necessary to navigate these situations.

References

Brookfield, S. (2015). The skillful teacher: On technique, trust, and responsiveness in the classroom (Third Edition). Jossey-Bass.

Gómez, Jennifer & Freyd, Jennifer. (2018). Psychological Outcomes of Within-Group Sexual Violence: Evidence of Cultural Betrayal. Journal of Immigrant and Minority Health. 20. 10.1007/s10903-017-0687-0.