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?