Confronting Resistance: Sonny's Blues--and Mine

Few of us would deny that a capacity for thoughtful and often uncomfortable negotiation between ideas that one already holds closely and new or different perspectives that a text might offer is crucial to mature literacy, but the devil is in the details of how to foster such critical thinking. During the semester that prompted this essay, there were three instances in which some of my developmental composition students responded to texts in such self-centered, such willfully naive ways that, instead of interpreting or even shedding light on the text, they appeared simply to defy it.

The most troubling and disorienting moment came when most of the male students in one of my sections refused to read, let alone write about, an assigned short story that charts the emotional growth of its homosexual protagonist. Never in my teaching career had students refused, on principle, to do the assigned reading. Despite my many years of experience, I was stunned by this intense reaction, the more so because I had led an uneventful discussion of the same story with a different, more heterogeneous group of students earlier that morning. My first impression was that the rebellious students were exhibiting a fundamental failure in reading comprehension, and I suppose that in a sense they were. But I came to realize that the failure was partly mine for making unwarranted assumptions about what they would naturally bring to the text. Later I began to see in their responses to reading and writing assignments a pattern that had to do with connections between feeling and thinking and with the differences between automatic responses and more critical, more reflective ones.

At their "worst," unexamined feelings appear to manifest "various levels of rage, incomprehension, . . . fear, and prejudice, which together forge innumerable hateful ways of knowing the world that have their own internalized systems, self-sustaining logics, and justifications" (Miller 1994: 405-6). Since these students, members of the same fraternity, tended to look to each other for affirmation, I saw more fear than hatred or intractable prejudice in the responses of even the most aggressively hostile among them. However, while recognizing the intensity of emotions and their role in intellectual analysis is sobering, it does not itself lead to more effective teaching.

In reflecting on my experience, I will suggest that it is helpful to think more systematically and more self-consciously than the culture of higher education typically demands about how to offer students the freedom to negotiate a space between where they are and where the author of a text is and, by implication, where they might be, both as readers and as citizens of the world. Without claiming to have discovered any protocols for doing so (like Marshall Gregory [2001: 75], I believe that we need to be less concerned with "method" than susceptible to contextually determined methods), I would like to propose how some aspects of cognitive theory can help us understand what seem like our students' "failures" of reading and can also help us shape constructive responses that foster deep and lasting learning.

Awareness of the complex relationship between beliefs and cognition (specifically, the ability to read and write analytically) is not new in higher education. Theorists of rhetoric and of the pedagogy of reading and writing have persuasively adapted Jean Piaget's (1981: 2-5) model of assimilation and accommodation to explain the "equilibrium" necessary for effective learning on the college level. In developing a rhetorical model of reading, Doug Brent (1992: 72), for example, argues that the art of effective reading is a kind of negotiation between, on the one hand, "old" knowledge and value systems (existing frames or schemata) and, on the other, "new" knowledge (the way we interpret the text we are confronting) and asserts an inevitable connection between feelings and literacy: "'Being persuaded' means accommodating an organized system of beliefs to take account of the new perspectives that are being offered." Melding the insights of classical rhetoric with those of modern psychology...