Week 12: Giving opportunities for rebellion in the classroom

This post draws from the idea of "underlife" from Robert Brook's "Underlife and Writing Instruction." As the title implies, I'll be exploring the need to incorporate opportunities in low-stakes assignments for students to resist or rebel against the role of "student" that so often threatens to strip them of their individual identities and voices.

This concept of "underlife," the life or personality that underlies the masks I wear for student, tutor, teacher, professional, friend, son, or lover, is important to acknowledge in the classroom. Students aren't blank slates. They aren't empty vessels waiting to be filled. Paulo Freire calls this model of pedagogy the "banking model of education." It effectively others and ostracizes students who do not or will not conform to the model being forced upon them. This stifles learning, creativity, and the possibility of creating new knowledge or applying knowledge in new ways. It stifles innovation and promotes stagnation.




Others have described it as an education system meant to mass-produce quantities of "productive citizens" that force students into the same, generic mold. Some students may feel like the education system is a soul-sucking assembly line akin to Aldous Huxley's 900 meter-long assembly line that ripened embryos into major instruments of social stability.

From Nick Sousanis's Unflattening

In social epistimic terms, each student is a network of history, culture, decisions, discussions, and experiences. In expressivist terms, each student is a unique individual who is irreplaceable and nonreplicable. It's important to acknowledge students as the human beings they are in the classroom, and it's also important, in my opinion, to give students opportunities to rebel against this feeling of dehumanization.

The triangle student is burning his grey-square, academic mask in an angsty refusal to conform to the identity of an academic.

Give students the opportunity in low-stakes assignments to express themselves in creative ways that reflect who they are and what they value. I suggest considering these assignments as a participation grade because, otherwise, we as an evaluative authority will be overstepping our bounds and placing a value judgment on that student's value system. In Brooke's words:

The point is not to disrupt the functioning of the classroom, but to provide the other participants in the classroom with a sense that one has other things to do, other interests, that one is a much richer personality than can be shown in this context. All these activities, in short, allow the student to take a stance towards her participation in the classroom, and show that, while she can succeed in this situation, her self is not swallowed up by it. The interesting parts of herself, she seems to say, are being held in reserve. 

This tension between students' underlife and their role as student can be detrimental if that dam bursts during final essays or projects. Providing students with safe opportunities to express this tension in low-stakes assignments allows the instructor to acknowledge this tension and to help create a more accepting and nonjudgmental learning environment in which students feel more able to express these concerns. Depending on the instructor's response, an instructor might teach students that these reactions and feelings are valid; and, in doing so, establishes himself or herself as an ally to help students learn how to work through those learning barriers in a way that allows them to retain a sense of self while still productively engaging in classes that impose that generic student mold.

I know that last bit may sound idealistic, but I feel that it's important to create a learning environment that doesn't "other" students or silence the voices of students who do not conform. We need that diversity. We need to learn how to exist alongside those who are different. We need to learn how to accept others and to value other's experiences and beliefs as equal to our own, even if those values are in direct contradiction to our own.