Denying students’ experience makes them insist more fiercely on its special authority

Evidence

Giroux suggests that professors must learn to respect the way students feel about their experiences as well as their need to speak about them in classroom settings: “You can’t deny that students have experiences and you can’t deny that these experiences are relevant to the learning process even though you might say these experiences are limited, raw, unfruitful or whatever. Students have memories, families, religions, feelings, languages and cultures that give them a distinctive voice. We can critically engage that experience and we can move beyond it. But we can’t deny it.” 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

Categorization

• DEFINE: The key mechanic: the more experience is negated, the more students elevate it as privileged knowing.
• XREF: connects to: Both identity politics and anti-experience purism alike can coerce and exclude students — bell hooks, Teaching to Transgress: Education as…, 172; Affirming experience’s importance reduces students’ need to treat it as privileged knowledge — bell hooks, Teaching to Transgress: Education as…, 175; Denying student experience provokes its aggressive assertion in class. — bell hooks, Teaching to Transgress: Education as…, 175 (+1 more)

Broader Connections

• Denying student experience provokes its aggressive assertion in class. #corroborates (0.98) — bell hooks, Teaching to Transgress, 175
• Traditional teacher authority dismisses student knowledge and acts oppressively #qualifies (0.72) — James D. Kirylo (ed.), Reinventing Pedagogy of the Oppressed, 724