Silent Complicity, Silent Resistance: Complacency in the Nontraditional Classroom

Two weeks into the fall semester and I am realizing that I might have my second extreme case of silence on my hands. I am uncomfortable with silence, especially when one voice is silencing others, but even more so when, having internalized the mores of "the academy," voices have silenced themselves so as not to disrupt their comfort of passivity, complicity, and dispassionate movement through what is seen as a required formal education. I understand that the banking model of education most students are used to has trained them in this behavior. I understand that it can be intimidating even downright terrifying to speak one's beliefs and opinions to a group of 20 relative strangers. I understand that some students cannot believe that language has the power I claim it does. But I'm not sure that is even the source of their rejection of my pedagogy. They seem to not care that they don't have power. Or perhaps they believe they already possess all the power they need. I fear the day they learn otherwise.

I have been thinking about this since the first day of class. I am concerned. I don't know what else to do, how else to engage them. I suppose ultimately I cannot bear the full responsibility of their lack of engagement. I cannot force them to choose to want more from their education.

I just finished bell hooks' Teaching to Transgress: Education as the Practice of Freedom, and she helped me better understand if not accept students' attitudes toward engaged pedagogy:

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We inhabit real institutions, where very little seems to be changed, where there are very few changes in the curriculum, almost no paradigm shifts, and where knowledge and information continue to be presented in the conventionally accepted manner. [...] What's really scary is that the negative critique of progressive pedagogy affects us--makes us afraid to change--to try new strategies. [...] When students did not appear to "respect their authority" they felt these practices were faulty, unreliable, and returned to traditional practices. Of course, they should have expected that students who have had a more conventional education would be threatened by and even resist teaching practices which insist that students participate in education and not be passive consumers.

That's very difficult to communicate to students because many of them are already convinced that they cannot respond to appeals that they be engaged in the classroom, because they've already been trained to view themselves as not the ones in authority, not the ones with legitimacy. To acknowledge student responsibility for the learning process is to place it where it's least legitimate in their own eyes. When we try to change the classroom so that there is a sense of mutual responsibility for learning, students get scared that you are now not the captain working with them, but that you are after all just another crew member--and not a reliable one at that.

To educate for freedom, then, we have to challenge and change the way everyone thinks about pedagogical process. This is especially true for students. Before we try to engage them in a dialogical discussion of ideas that is mutual, we have to teach about process. (144-5)

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In writing about her "failure" to create such a classroom experience one semester, hooks affirms,

That failure was heartbreaking for me. It was hard to accept that I was not able to control the direction our classroom was moving in. I would think, "What can I do? And what could I have done?" And I kept reminding myself that I couldn't do it alone, that forty other people were also in there. (183)

I hope that Project 2 works toward changing their minds about education. We will watch a movie that avers the model of students as teachers. I cannot begin to count the number of times I've heard students bitch about their college experience--the content of their classes, instructional methods, graduation requirements...the list could go on and on--but when confronted with the idea of a radical paradigm shift in higher education that would require them to take on the primary responsibility of their education, they are completely unwilling to accept such power and are instead completely content to give others power over them and what they learn. Their unquestioning willingness to divest themselves of power disturbs me greatly. And I don't know how to open their eyes.