Student/teacher resistance comes in many different forms, and it functions differently given different situations, students, and teachers. Still, I find it useful to name and discuss with students general categories of postFreudian resistance that may sometimes hinder their engaging texts, speaking in class, or writing papers. In my classrooms, the most common types of resistance are the following:
- Denial emerges when students or teachers refuse to acknowledge the existence of an idea or action. Denial also emerges when students or teachers acknowledge the existence of an idea or action but refuse to acknowledge any accountability-individual and/or systemic-for any privileges or obstacles afforded us by (the history of) this idea or action.
- Dismissal emerges when students or teachers acknowledge the existence of an idea or action but deem it insignificant in general, insignificant in our own lives, or too dangerous for class discussion.
- Indifferent compliance emerges when students or teachers go through the motions but do not genuinely engage an idea or action.
- Defensiveness emerges when students or teachers shift conversations from discussions of an idea or action and instead focus on ourselves, that is, on our own guilt/blame-or lack thereof.
- Overidentification emerges when students or teachers see
ourselves as so implicated within an idea or action that we can only imagine confessional responses that preclude cultural/ systemic analyses; such overidentification may trigger strong emotions (e.g., fear, embarrassment, righteous anger). - Nonproductive guilt emerges when students or teachers blame ourselves for current privileges afforded us by history and, thus, either adopt a patronizingly “helpful” attitude toward those we imagine to be less privileged or focus solely on ourselves and our perceived guilt.
- Adherence to gender- and/or color-blindness emerges when students or teachers ignore history, obsess on the present, and demand an ideal egalitarian fairness that treats everyone identically but ignores different daily effects of gender and race and other cultural categories.
- Speaking block or writing block emerges when students or teachers lack a lexicon, a conceptual framework, and/or confidence that the classroom is a viable space for speaking and writing about resistance-prone issues, such as gender and whiteness. Each teacher must, of course, analyze her or his local conditions to identify the most common types of resistance that occur. But naming and discussing such resistance provide choices to students and teachers about whether to perpetuate, revise, and/or resist the resistance.
— From Krista Ratcliffe’s “Listening Pedagogically: A Tactic for Listening to Classroom Resistance” in Rhetorical Listening: Identification, Gender, Whiteness, 138-9.