The Skillful Teacher

Acknowledge the Right to Resist
In most college classrooms there are limits to how much we can
force people to learn something they wish to avoid. Baptiste (2000)
has argued that coercion is a natural part of learning and that it can
be exercised in a principled and ethical manner. But if people are
resolutely opposed to your efforts, your options are limited. My
experience is that past a certain point it’s a waste of effort to try to
force learning. Ultimately, the learner has to make the internal
commitment to become involved.
This does not mean that you should not explain, with all the
force and conviction you can muster, why you think it’s in students’
own best interests to learn something new. But if all your reasoning
means nothing to learners, then you have to grant people the right
not to learn something that you are convinced is important. Maybe
you can strike a bargain with hard-core resisters that allows them
to work in ways that do not interfere with the learning of others. I
have sometimes devised group projects with the intention of remov-
ing the most destructive resistance from the room. This happens
when I group all the hard-core resisters into one team and set them
a project to work on outside of the classroom. They can then go off,
vent together, and eventually implode into a black hole of nega-
tivity while the rest of us can get on with some work.
Ultimately, students have the right to resist learning something
we’re urging on them. Just as in the past we may well have refused
to learn things for reasons that are quite legitimate to us, so we must
acknowledge that our own students will do the same. If students
resist learning activities that we feel are important, this doesn’t mean
we’re incompetent or unconvincing. It may be that at a later date
the relevance, necessity, or delight of the learning will become as
clear to them as it is to us. It may be, too, that we are mistaken in
the emphasis we place on a particular act of learning and that sub-
sequently we will come to see the legitimacy of students’ complaints.
Remember that resistance to learning is normal, natural, and
inevitable. The trick is to make sure it interferes as little as possible
with classroom activities that others see as important and helpful.
Responding to Resistance
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13
M
any teachers probably don’t consider teaching to be a politi-
cal activity. Their main concern is to make sure that their
students acquire a predetermined body of useful knowledge and/or
required skills. Colleagues with this conviction frequently tell me
their job is to teach their subject, assess their students’ progress, and
pick up their paycheck. They are extremely bemused when I sug-
gest they are political actors since it has never occurred to them to
think of their work as having any political dimensions. This per-
ception of college teaching as having nothing to do with politics is
shared by most of the general population. To many people outside
the academy, professorial life is thought of as one step short of
monastic seclusion. College teaching is deemed to be the practice
of high-minded intellectual ascetics ensconced in an ivory tower of
pure thought and interested only in the pursuit of truth and beauty.
Sometimes higher education is thought of as a refuge for those frail
individuals too sensitive to participate in the maelstrom of daily
existence. Novels such as David Lodge’s Nice Work (1988) carica-
ture the view of business that teaching is a shielded occupation 
suitable for those unable to survive the harsh vicissitudes of com-
mercial life. Both these beliefs—that teaching is apolitical and that
teachers have retreated from the conflicts and anxieties of daily
existence—are fundamentally misconceived.