Teaching, Learning, and Resistance

This article is a discussion of the importance of using student resistance to inform and change teacher practice. The authors relate two narratives of practice, one of which takes place in a constructivist second-grade classroom in Ontario, and a second that takes place in a preservice classroom in California. In the first, a student uses the class message board to highlight her own social difficulties and breaks several classroom rules to do so. In the second, a group of preservice teachers resist their instructor’s attempt to provide an alternative to the Open Court Reading mandated in California schools. The authors reflect on the narratives in terms of their similarities in highlighting the limited identities offered to these students, despite their teachers’ practice of alternative pedagogy, and demonstrate that student resistance is a valuable source of information for reflecting upon the limitations of teacher practice.