Dear Martin and everybody--
Martin wrote,
> I am not sure of Eugene's concerns for the concept of "resistance".
> Resistance is in the eye of the beholder. Wills's lads were active in
> their own construction of a school counter culture, and this culture
> defined its own meanings of success , failure, happiness etc. It is
> because external values run counter to their systems definitions that we
> choose to describe it as different. Being a resistor does not necessarily
> make you a "good" person. Making a living by crime is a form of
> resistance... but that does not fit with the proper noun of the French
> "resistance" . Nevertheless cultures of criminality are oppositional to a
> prevailing hegemony. The lads were well beyond the school's laws. So yes
> they were Resistance and yes they were Dissidents, but not the same type
> as the "heroic type".
>
> I need to think some more about cheating. A critique of the examination
> system and the values it supports ?... or is the "greed" for success a
> demonstration of extreme compliance with the system that demands success
> in the "screening" by whatever means possible? Quite different from the
> case presented by Willis.
I agree with Martin wholeheartedly that people who resist may not be good,
nice people. It is not where my concern about definition of what is
resistance came from. In brief, my concern comes from what I would call
"behavioristic" approach to defining what is resistance by operationalizing
a concept by specific behavior. My alternative proposal is to focus on
meaning making, relations, and intentions of the participants rather on
behavior of non-complaining subordinates (e.g., cheating, stealing,
sabotaging, postponing, forgetting, confronting). In my view, an action by a
participant should not be reduced to behavior because observably the same
behaviors may have different meanings. For example, cheating can be a part
of the activity system (e.g., a traditional school) to the conform the
system or can be against the activity system to destroy or transform the
system. Again there are cases when the difference is blurry but it may be
useful still to see the difference because it produces important
consequences for the future of the activity system. (By the way, cheating as
conforming and cheating as resistance are not the only possible meanings of
cheating.)
In this sense, I respectfully disagree with Martin's statement that "Making
a living by crime is a form of resistance..." In my view, this statement is
an overgeneralization. Crime by itself is not necessarily a form of
resistance and can have many alternative meanings in specific contexts. (The
best scientific answer for any inquiry is "it depends" :-)
Renee's example about her daughter is a good one. Teachers are very quick to
jump to a conclusion that a student that does not meet their expectations is
resistant while it may be that the teacher's expectations are simply
unrealistic and wrong.
What do you think?
Eugene
> -----Original Message-----
> From: Martin Owen [mailto:mowen@rem.bangor.ac.uk]
> Sent: Monday, June 25, 2001 6:24 AM
> To: xmca@weber.ucsd.edu
> Subject: Re: values, development, diversity or not
>
>
> Friday pm I went to a seminar given by Jamaican teacher trainers and
> curriculum developers. Currently they teach reading of standard colonial
> english through a principally phonics approach whilst the kids come in
> with Jamaican Creole which has a different phoneme structure. Apparently
> the kids are "proficient in Creole". They wonder why they have "literacy
> problems". Hereabouts we teach bilingually. Welsh phonemes match Welsh
> orthography making it a sensible approach. The politics of imperialism
> live long.
>
> This is an issue of politics and associated self-confidence, the economics
> of schooling in a "social democratic" capitalist Europe. There has been a
> 500 year political struggle in Wales for language rights which have only
> had a legal basis for 25 years. In our local area welsh does present a
> threat to the monoglot English community and we can see a backlash, but in
> the global scheme of things, Welsh and Welsh speakers to not pose a threat
> to English speakers in Great Britain (compare anti-english sentiment in
> English speaking Ireland). It is however a political issue and a site of
> resistance in a very orthodox political sense.
>
> The treatment of Urdu in England and Spanish in the US presents whole new
> vistas of political struggle (I might ask Renee >> "how is your daughter's
> Galego coming on?").However I imagine that the school which Renee's
> daughter goes to does not have a regular stream of people for whom
> Castiliano is not the expected language of tuition..... nevertheless
> generating a site of conflict and resistance for those who mediate the
> world through different cultural systems..
>
> I am not sure of Eugene's concerns for the concept of "resistance".
> Resistance is in the eye of the beholder. Wills's lads were active in
> their own construction of a school counter culture, and this culture
> defined its own meanings of success , failure, happiness etc. It is
> because external values run counter to their systems definitions that we
> choose to describe it as different. Being a resistor does not necessarily
> make you a "good" person. Making a living by crime is a form of
> resistance... but that does not fit with the proper noun of the French
> "resistance" . Nevertheless cultures of criminality are oppositional to a
> prevailing hegemony. The lads were well beyond the school's laws. So yes
> they were Resistance and yes they were Dissidents, but not the same type
> as the "heroic type".
>
> I need to think some more about cheating. A critique of the examination
> system and the values it supports ?... or is the "greed" for success a
> demonstration of extreme compliance with the system that demands success
> in the "screening" by whatever means possible? Quite different from the
> case presented by Willis.
>
>
> All in all I think Bill's developing analysis sound.
>
> back to work...
> Martin
>
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b29 : Sun Jul 01 2001 - 01:01:41 PDT