Introduction And Rationale
In the modern-day classroom, students are repeatedly resisting what I would call an essential part of their life. Their education. In a teenager’s eyes, we live in a world where school feels forced when it should feel like a privilege, feelings of school being treated as obligatory “unpaid labor,” not freedom; and all they see is a world where social media influencers are displaying successful careers through the internet and not even mentioning school achievements.
What I and many other educators are viewing in today’s classroom is paving the way for a very scary future for education and our country. What students are seeing today is that the value of education seems to be altered to fit an agenda versus facing facts. They are missing out on a vital fact that the resistance of knowledge is a recipe for a doomed society. With educators serving today as the primary giver of information to our youth, the question of why students resist such valuable information becomes a great topic for research.
Some main questions guiding this unit are as follows:
What does resistance look like, and how can we see it in text? How do students see each other differently, when they are all very similar? What helps people find common ground across race, culture, and/or trauma?
So, what do we do? How do we frame a lesson where we are allowing students to state their claims on how valuable their education is? Or how they can see there is a way where they can use a simple trait of knowledge to be seen as a statement. Where we can begin to see into the mindset of why education is useful, and then create a new visual for them to see the one freedom that they are resisting, who so many across this world literally lose their lives trying to defend. With this being a shortened version of a full six-week unit, my goal for you would be to keep going after this initial movement. Students need to understand that what they take for granted (their education) is a sacred value in other parts of the world that some people actually lose their lives trying to defend.
At what point did education become a fear? Has the fear of failure chemically changed their way of thinking? Have they discovered that one can be successful without actually being fully educated, and that basic reading, writing, and arithmetic can still allow them to get a job to begin their journey in the working world? This is the paradox. Resisting the freedom that allows them to be free in the first place.
Since I am only able to complete a 2-week unit, based on the mandatory guidelines of my school district, I plan on using excerpts from the books The Freedom Writers Diary and Diary of a Young Girl to help bring this unit to life. The Freedom Writers Diary is about a young, brand sparkling new teacher, who begins her teaching career in a rough school district. She quickly learns that almost all of her students are African American and Hispanic, while the very lowest demographic were the very few white/Caucasian students.
The book quotes, to sum this up, “How a Teacher and 150 Teens Used Writing to Change Themselves and the World Around Them.” The Freedom Writers phrase modifies the group of activists from the civil rights movement named the “Freedom Riders” who challenged racial segregation through interstate transportation. While reading these diary entries, you will be able to see how the students begin to challenge silence through documentation. 1
It becomes a form of resistance through action. The book includes hundreds of journal entries from her students as well as herself. She encourages her students to “just write.” These two books are obviously substantially different. The common theme here is they are both diaries. One is from a single Jewish girl’s perspective of her experience in hiding, and the other is a reflection on various moments of life, as well as reflections on Anne Frank within The Freedom Writers Diaries itself. 2
As we all know, the more your students write, the better writers they become. Writing can be private, as a diary should be, but then it could also change the future of knowledge by allowing people to have a different point of view. It allows them to no longer be an outsider to their own opinion, and more to give them an actual viewpoint to hold onto. There is also a movie based on the freedom writers, I highly, HIGHLY encourage you to watch it, to really get a grasp of this book, and to watch these students grow into amazing and brilliant humans.
It’s really a breath of fresh air to see students hit their “A-ha” moments. I feel like if this unit is conducted right, I think that you will have an amazing moment where your students can get a sense of trust with you. At the beginning of the year, this really hits because you have a group of brand-new faces. What better way to get them to trust you than by allowing them to be vulnerable in a safe space.
The biggest difference between the two books, like I mentioned, is that one was written by one single person, while the other is a collection of entries from Ms. Gruwell’s students over a period of time. One was writing a journal of her feelings while in hiding from Nazi persecution while the other was written from personal experiences of racism, gang violence, discrimination and other triggering acts of violence. They are not historically relevant. However, pairing the two texts allows you to share themes of hope, and the desire to be understood. We don’t want this to be used as a way for students to compare sufferings. It’s a way where students can make sense of their own journeys and worlds around them to find a common theme. 3
Students’ resistance to education is usually a defense mechanism. They resist assignments, usually authority and whatever expectations the school district has because their past traumas and experiences have taught them to expect that failure is imminent. This exact reason is why you should pair these two texts, because it explores how resistance within their own life, is actually allowing the violence, hatred, and stereotyping to continue. It keeps them silent.
How does writing become a form of resistance? You will likely hear students ask how? Or maybe you open with class discussion on that simple question. By challenging imposed identity, creating new vision for the future, refusing to allow specific people to be erased from history, writing allows for a piece to last a lifetime of change. We can see that in the Declaration of Independence. That simple document; is what has kept our country free from English rule. A piece of paper, signed by a bunch of guys in wigs and coats that has kept this country free for 250 years.
We want them to write to resist the silence. We can’t imagine who Anne Frank was if her diary was never found. She would have been lost to the world, as we all know she perished in a concentration camp after her family was caught in hiding during the Holocaust. But, due to her writing, her legacy continued and will continue until the end of time because of how loud her silenced voice is and forever will be. It allows us to recognize signs of history repeating itself. When you resist education, you allow for tyranny to become a normal part of your life. 4
Which is something most students don’t actually understand. So, I encourage you to continue even after this introductory unit, to go on to develop a deeper level of understanding for your students that discusses how being uneducated is actually worse than being educated itself. There are plenty of resources out there where you can begin to develop a unit that discusses how students resisting their education, is the very thing that could in turn lean to a tyrannical rule of government. I encourage you to explore readings such as I am Malala or Zlata’s Diary to continue to build on why students need to understand what true resistance in education looks like and how they are setting the future of their children’s world could look like. The Freedom Writers Diaries become a safe space. The students begin to realize how beneficial journaling is during their own personal hard times and it becomes a “favorite” thing for them to do throughout the story, but it’s also amazing to see the perspective from the teacher’s point of view.5
The strengths of my students lie in their ability to value their independence and their awareness of social issues, their ability to balance home life and school life, language barriers, and other difficult areas in their walks of life, but they still show up for school every day. One take-back that I want you to remember is that just because their head is down, doesn’t necessarily mean that they aren’t listening. The mental process that I have yet to figure out, of why students feel the need to resist something so obvious, is something of almost a level of remarkable.
So, let’s put this into a different perspective. If we think about it, when we got our first jobs either after high school or even during, did they ask for our high school transcripts? Did they ask what number we rank in our class? Did they ask what kind of extracurricular activities we participate in? Not really. They want to know if we can complete the job, be a valuable asset to their industry, and sometimes they ask if you are bilingual. Which many of my students that I work with every day in the Hispanic community are.
Students today are almost taught that if you don’t get a full education, you will never get a job. Which clearly is not true at all. So, we need to stop that mindset. Yes, you can get a job without being fully educated on the Pythagorean theorem, or the reacting points of whatever it is they do in chemistry, but that’s not the point. The point is, that there is a purpose hidden in education that the students don’t see, and this unit is going to show them what those values are.
In regards to completion, I encourage you to really allow your students to actually write. Write what they are thinking about at the moment of completion. Allow them to still make the decision on how they chose to view their education going forward. There is no right or wrong. There is an ethical answer to these and it’s time our students see it through the end.
As a current grad student at Texas A&M University studying educational psychology, I felt a massive pull to this topic of resistance because we live in it every single day with our students. We as teachers are often looked at as tyrants, dictators, micro-managers, and my favorite line that I hear, “not their mama’s”. Well, sweet student of mine, you are correct, I am “not your mama,” but what I am is your teacher, whom you spend more time with during your adolescent life then your actual families.
If we do the math, your students will spend roughly 19,519.5 hours of their lives with their teachers as a group from kindergarten through walking the stage at graduation. This is based on the estimated start time for our students in our district of arrival time, which is 7:45 in the morning, to the dismissal bell, which rings around 4:00 every day, 182 days out of the school year. Just about their entire childhood is spent with us at school.
My students in our fairly large school district live in a world where many of them are not always encouraged at home. They live with a mentality that passing is enough, and constantly ask “how many do I have to have right to pass?” Instead of just simply doing the best you can. My favorite thing to say back is “how do you know how many you got correct?” Are you smarter than you are putting off to me? I mean certainly if you can actually count how many you know are correct, to where you can blow off the rest of the assignment.
I teach freshman and sophomore age students in a low income, or Title 1, school district. We have a diverse community of students with what we say in layman’s terms as “low reading levels.” My students generally are ranging, on paper, in the 3rd and 4th grade reading levels, as calculated by their beginning of year to end of year MAP scores. In my class, with many students that are still actively trying to learn the English language (ESL, or English as a second language) we can see the correlation of these MAP scores to their retention in the classroom.
I find myself wondering, how can I get this message across to them? How can I implement “student-led teaching” into my room to help? Maybe recruiting the help of some of my bilingual students that have an impressive vocabulary to really help with translation, but then you are stuck with wondering if they said it right. No part of me likes to depend on electronic translation tools, especially with students trying to learn the language as I fully believe the best way to learn is submerse yourself into the language without interruption to crutch on your own language, but I would be lying if I told you that I didn’t buy the new Air Pods with the translation feature to listen in real time just to make sure they are saying what I said correctly. Because I absolutely did.
The curriculum unit that I am striving to develop will in theory help students understand what it means to develop a healthy habit of resistance. I am not striving to introduce a theory that the students see as a “you’re messing up” situation, but more giving them an opportunity to reflect, and to create an awareness of what it means to resist the very freedoms that are granted to them at birth, and to learn what it could mean to truly resist the number one thing that will keep their country and the world from being run through tyranny. That missing key is what we call education. My vision for this whole unit is going to bring my studies of psychology and real-life examples of how worlds beyond ours look when the right to education is taken away, and for them to understand that education is actually a form of resistance in itself.
I personally feel that this unit is going to be one of the most beneficial for our students at my school, not just because of the demographic, but I can without a doubt say that one of the most common phrases we as teachers here is “when are we ever going to use this?” My hope is that our students at Rudder High School, and across the country for whatever teachers choose to read this unit, will be able to see how every subject that is taught in their life has a purpose. We may not see it in its entirety right off the bat, but there is a purpose for every part of education, and you should not resist it. Can you be successful without a good portion of it? Yes; however, I choose to not live in the mentality of surviving on the bare minimum.
Back to the part about students that are asking “how many do I need to pass?” It’s like saying “what all do we need to know just to get a job...” and that is just not a good enough mentality for me. Because I was that student. I was a “C’s get degrees” kid. I was a “that’s good enough” kid, and I was a teen mom that struggled growing up because of that mentality. It’s not good enough for me, and it’s certainly not good enough for my kids. And now look at me. I’m working at Yale University, developing this unit alongside brilliant professors, and education has taken me further than any spot I’ve ever been in. So, I strive to build this unit SO GOOD, that they can see a new mindset to want to know more. And then hopefully by the end of their senior years, allow them to see where they began, and where they are on their last day of high school. We as educators strive daily to help students understand that being educated is not a bad thing, so quit looking at it like it is. You don’t have to live in fight or flight mode your whole life. You don’t have to keep yourself where your community has told you you’d never leave from. Your life is whatever you want it to be. You are not bound by your own mental boundaries. Your mental boundaries are bound to you.
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