Understanding Resistance in Students at Risk

We are using a poststructuralist perspective of resistance that posits resistance as socially constructed and agentic (Collins, 1995), as existing in multiple forms (Ferrell, 1995), and as an ideologically organized expression of power that is inherently political (Miron & Lauria, 1995). In this view, resistance is intimately connected with the formation of identity (Collins, 1995; Miron & Lauria, 1995). Miron and Lauria (1995) describe the relationship between student resistance and identity as "specifically concern[ing] a struggle for identity (self-definition) or what we shall call identity politics. This understanding begins from the ground of students' everyday life and from the poststructural tenet that power is decentered and everywhere" (p. 30). Davies (1993) characterizes the struggle as a central tension of childhood that comes from "the simultaneous struggle to be seamlessly meshed in the social fabric and to know and to signal oneself as a being with specificity" (p. 16). Understanding student resistance as a struggle, or tension, is crucial for a more complex understanding. It allows us to see resistance as an event in time co-produced by different players in relation to each other. We would like to be able to recognize some forms of resistance as desirable, even necessary to the development of thoughtful, critical thinkers. We do not, however, wish to romanticize resistance -- to set up conditions whereby, as one teacher remarked, "Children can simply stamp their feet and have all the wisdom leave the room." Nor do we wish to naturalize adolescent resistance (Lesko, 1996) -- that is, to regard adolescents as objects undergoing massive physiological and psychological turmoil and to take for granted that they are "immature, dangerous and needing to be controlled" (p. 153). This conception of adolescents also positions adults and children in relations of binary opposition that reify age and it "cements adults in positions of superiority, regardless of the topic" (Lesko, 1996, p. 155). We further do not wish to give in to the post-modern tendency to celebrate resistance (Bordo, 1993), "to press the rhetoric of resistance into the service of normalization" (p. 183) such that resistance becomes one of the cultural norms of schools against which we measure students. Our intention is to develop a more complex understanding of resistance, moving beyond a discourse that locates the problem in a "naturalized" adolescent and uses dichotomies and binary o