Student Siberias

In Ira Shor's When Students Have Power: Negotiating Authority in a Critical Pedagogy he discusses how students create a "Siberia" within the classroom. By sitting in the rear corners students act out their desire for distance from the seat of authority – the front. This is both for practical reasons (easier to nap, pay less attention, have freedom to do other things) but also indicates how they have been habituated to see classroom authority figures as something to resist, not to be trusted, that their role is passive.

Shor experimented with “moving to Siberia” – sitting in the back of the room, moving around, generally disrupting the usual patterns of behavior. Strange he never thought to put the chairs in a circle. Circles are one powerful way to disrupt this dynamic. Often students are uncomfortable with this at first – you can’t hide, it is hard to do other things besides participate. But it also places more pressure on the teacher and group to create learning experiences worth participating in. Simple practices like circles provide a powerfully different experience than people usually experience in their lives. Instead of being a passive audience circles ask all to both be heard and to listen, to actively contribute to everyone’s learning, to talk openly about process, limits and authority.

Where do you see Siberias in your teaching or learning? What functions do they serve? Do you see Siberia as a place to be "lazy" or a place to resist? Both?

Race, Gender and Resistance - Thoughts on "Teaching to Transgress" by bell hooks

I find myself processing hooks’ (she uses all lower case for her name) book as much from a personal standpoint (how I read it) than from an academic standpoint (what it says). Though I presumably share many of her political views about the nature of oppression, white privilege, capitalism and patriarchy – I feel a strange sense of resistance when reading her story as a female black professor educated in both the segregated and de-segregated South as a child. I can’t pass it off as intellectual disagreement since I ostensibly hold many of the same views. After thinking about where this comes from within me I realized a few things. First, I don’t want to feel bad about myself. I don’t know that this is what she is asking for but I fear that if I were to accept her thesis in toto I would need to feel repentant for things that I had no say over – my maleness, my whiteness, my having been born into the developed Western world during a time of its supremacy. I think many students (and instructors!) who encounter serious discussions of race and gender have this experience/resistance.

I think maybe this a case of “wanting my cake and to eat it too.” I want to be on the right side of progressive thinking about race and gender yet I do not want to feel discomfort with the part I have/do play in the maintenance of the system that supports and promulgates oppression. I felt better when she acknowledged this experience in her book. She shares the story of students who came to her during one of her classes. They said that the class was leading them into a great depression about life. Where they were once comfortable they now saw bias and oppression all around them. She expressed (and since then works into her courses) a discussion of the personal experience of pain and discomfort that often happens when students begin to confront systems and ways of being that had once been comfortable or unexamined.

If anything, I think that this illustrates the power of the dominant culture. Even as someone who has explicitly set out to be a change agent, addressing many of the same issues close to hooks’ heart, I still have been inculcated with dominant culture’s frames and a natural resistance to examine my position in this society. It reminds me of the difference being charitable and being radical. To be charitable is want to make life better for the other without recognizing the need for change in one’s self. To be radical is to join with the needs and sufferings of the other as one’s self. To be radical is to recognize that we cannot be separate, that to help others we must often confront ourselves, that “when one is oppressed none are free.”

Early learning experience

Many of our attitudes toward learning are shaped by our earliest experiences. 

What are some of your earliest experiences as a learner?

How did you react toward teachers? Parents? Or others who wanted to "teach" you something?

What was your attitude toward school as a child?

What did you like least? Like most?

Power, Authority and Restorative Practices

This is an abridged version of a paper I presented at a recent conference in Oaxaca, Mexico. It contains some of the general concepts I'll be exploring in my doctoral research.

You can view it online here.

This abridged version was published on the Restorative Practices eForum. If you find these ideas interesting I highly suggest you sign-up for this free service offered by the International Institute for Restorative Practices (IIRP).