A resisting minority can outweigh a professor’s will to build learning community

Evidence

Usually it is in a context where the experiential knowledge of students is being denied or negated that they may feel most determined to impress upon listeners both its value and its superiority to other ways of knowing. — bell hooks, Teaching to Transgress, 175 (#corroborates, via linked claim)

Last semester, I had a class where when I finished I was walking on air. It had been a great class. The students left realizing that they didn’t have to think like me, that I wasn’t there to reproduce myself. They left with a sense of engagement, with a sense of themselves as critical thinkers, excited about intellectual activity. The semester before that, I had this class that I just hated. I hated it so bad I didn’t want to get up in the morning and go to it. I couldn’t even sleep at night, because I hated it so much I feared that I would sleep through it. And it was an 8:00 A.M. class. It didn’t work. One of the things that fascinated me about that experience is that we failed to create a learning community in the classroom. That did not mean that individual students didn’t learn a great deal, but in terms of creating a communal context for learning, it was a failure. 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. — bell hooks, Teaching to Transgress, 314 (#qualifies, via linked claim)

Categorization

• XREF: connects to: Professors resist treating students as whole people rather than as knowledge seekers; Progressive professors most often risk engaged pedagogy as resistance; Denying student experience provokes its aggressive assertion in class. — bell hooks, Teaching to Transgress: Education as…, 175 (+2 more)

Broader Connections

• Denying student experience provokes its aggressive assertion in class. #corroborates (0.78) — bell hooks, Teaching to Transgress, 175
• Progressive professors most often risk engaged pedagogy as resistance #qualifies (0.74)
• Classroom success depends on collective community, not individual learning or teacher control #qualifies (0.73) — bell hooks, Teaching to Transgress, 314
• Professors resist treating students as whole people rather than as knowledge seekers #complicates (0.72)