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partners, friends, and colleagues, can be risky, leading eventually to
cultural suicide. The perception of this danger, and experience of
its actuality, is a common theme in working-class students’ autobi-
ographies (see, for example, Dews and Law, 1995; Welsch, 2004)
and was even the topic of a successful commercial feature film
Educating Rita. Students who take critical thinking seriously and
start to question shared assumptions, or students who clearly believe
themselves to be changing for the better as a result of their learn-
ing, report that those around them start to view them with fear and
loathing, with a hostility born of incomprehension.
When a student who was formerly seen by friends and intimates
as “one of us” engages in purposeful learning, she risks being seen
in one of two negative ways. On the one hand, she may be viewed
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as putting on airs and pretensions, as growing “too big for her
boots.” She is seen as aspiring to the status of an intellectual in con-
trast to her friends, family members, or work colleagues who feel
that they are now somehow regarded as less developed creatures
grubbing around in the gritty gutters of daily life outside academe.
The learner who is clearly engaged in exploring new vistas of skill
and knowledge can pose a real threat to those who are not on a sim-
ilar journey of self-discovery. In the eyes of those left behind, the
student is perceived as having betrayed her origins to embrace the
values, behaviors, and allegiances of an alien academic culture.
On the other hand, learners in critical process are sometimes seen
as turning into subversive troublemakers whose raison d’être now
seems to be to make life as difficult and uncomfortable as possible for
those around them. A common experience reported by first-genera-
tion college students is of their rapidly being marginalized as a result
of their slipping into a more critical mode in their daily lives. They
find that raising critical questions regarding commonly held cultural
assumptions engenders resentment and suspicion. Those around
them feel that the students concerned have betrayed the group cul-
ture and somehow become pink-tinged revolutionaries. Many stu-
dents complain that displaying their honest engagement with
learning only serves to make them disliked by their colleagues, harms
their careers, loses them fledgling friends and professionally useful
acquaintances, threatens their livelihoods, and turns them into insti-
tutional pariahs.
Cultural suicide is not only the preserve of learners. Teachers also
unwittingly commit cultural suicide when their peers and intimates
see them as committing ethnic or class betrayal. Students from eth-
nic minorities with a history of oppression who enter college and
become teachers can be seen as selling out to the host
culture and joining the oppressor. Venturing into what is seen as the
White supremacist mainstream of Anglo culture, they run a real risk
of being regarded as traitors to their race. Academics from working-
class backgrounds find themselves, as aptly described in Ryan and
Understanding and Responding to the Emotions of Learning
85
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86
T
HE
S
KILLFUL
T
EACHER
Sackey’s (1984) evocatively titled book, Strangers in Paradise. Their
parents, siblings, and friends are nonplussed and threatened by the
incomprehensible path into academe that they have taken.
Teachers who are seen to be constantly experimenting with their
teaching can commit cultural suicide without even being aware that
this is happening. As they speak to colleagues about how they’re
questioning and reevaluating their practice, or how they’re doing
things differently, they run a real risk that those colleagues will see
them as engaged in an act of betrayal. They are whistle-blowers on
the culture of stasis—the collective agreement not to rock the boat
by asking awkward questions or doing things differently. As one
teacher-reflection group member puts it, “I guess a lot of people
want things to remain as they are. They don’t like it when I start
asking questions or posing alternatives” (Miller, 1990, p. 140).
One common scenario for committing cultural suicide concerns
teachers who reenter their institutions after a provocative period of
reflection. This reflection might have been occasioned by attend-
ing a professional conference or by a faculty development workshop,
by informal conversations with colleagues, or a private period of sus-
tained reading and introspection. One result of the reflection is a
newly realized conviction of the importance of getting colleagues
to ask a few more questions about why they work in the ways that
they do. Surfing on a wave of unbridled enthusiasm for critical ques-
tioning (and unaware of the possibility that others might not share
this zeal), teachers report how their wave collapses in on them as
colleagues seem at best bemused, and at worst angry, at being con-
fronted with new and challenging ideas or practices.
As newly energized teachers begin talking enthusiastically about
the need to question and challenge taken-for-granted assumptions,
they can easily, and unwittingly, alienate their colleagues. Teachers
who start to distribute xeroxed articles on how college curricula mask
racism, sexism, and classism can force otherwise liberal teachers into
a defensive, overly reactionary posture. When teachers return from
graduate classes talking about new concepts, theoretical constructs,
and fifty-seven brands of hermeneutic postmodernism, they can
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easily be perceived as having “gone native” and turned into a fully
fledged participant in the tribal culture of academe. This feeling may
be completely unjustified, but the sense of betrayal remains.
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