The Skillful Teacher

Participating in higher education is valued highly in some subcul-
tures, viewed suspiciously in others. A student’s decision to attend
college entails many social and psychological changes. One of these
Responding to Resistance
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T
HE
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KILLFUL
T
EACHER
is the risk of being regarded with mistrust in their home cultures and
of facing eventual exclusion. This is the risk of cultural suicide dis-
cussed in Chapter Five. These cultures may tolerate educational par-
ticipation better if it is felt that the student’s learning helps support
the culture’s interests and values. Additionally, students who can
communicate about their learning using language that is easily
understandable within the culture decrease the risk of cultural sui-
cide. But if students are pushed too quickly into learning skills or
considering ideas that the culture views as radical and unfamiliar,
they run the risk of being viewed as betrayers who have rejected
their allegiance to their own culture.
There is also the problem of teachers from one culture asking
students from another one to learn in ways that represent only the
teacher’s cultural mores and traditions. Asian students who are
asked to challenge the teacher’s authority as evidence of their abil-
ity to think critically, aboriginal students who are asked to speak
only of their own independent opinions and judgments as if these
had no cultural formation, African American students who are told
to speak one at a time in contradiction to the layered and simulta-
neous speech patterns of the West Niger delta—all these are being
asked to learn in ways that go against their own cultural traditions.
This is an impossible Catch-22. To succeed they need to do some-
thing that denies practices constitutive of their identity.
Faced with the psychologically devastating prospect of losing
their cultural supports, many students (not surprisingly) choose not
to pay the price required of learning. I have seen this dynamic with
working-class students for whom taking education seriously (that is,
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 funda-
mentalist groups for whom a member’s consenting exposure to new
spiritual ideas is regarded as tantamount to blasphemy. I have also
seen it in racial groups in which a commitment to learning past a
certain point is seen as indicating that the learners have joined the
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dominant White supremacist culture. In all these situations students’
resistance to learning will spring from their perception that if they
go past a certain point they will commit cultural suicide.
The culture of entitlement, described graphically by Sacks
(1996), is another factor. This culture operates when students feel
that by showing up in class they deserve to receive an A grade for
the course irrespective of the amount or quality of their work. It is
seen in students’ belief that it is the teacher’s responsibility to get
them through a learning task and, consequently, that if the learner
fails it is the teacher’s fault. The mentality is that the student is a
customer paying for a service and that the customer is always right.
If the service or product (usually an A grade) is not delivered, then
in the student’s mind the teacher should be held responsible. One
aspect of the culture of entitlement is the students’ belief that the
teacher should be endlessly accommodating to their circumstances,
such as being willing to accept work being completed late for assign-
ment after assignment. Another is students’ feeling that it is their
right to choose to arrive late, leave early, and ignore teachers’
instructions. This culture is underscored by marketing materials that
emphasize that if a student chooses a particular college, its teachers
will do all they can to ensure her success. This is a laudable and
appropriate commitment but the other half of the equation—the
student’s responsibility to make a reasonable effort to persist at learn-
ing in the face of difficulties and problems—often goes unmentioned.