Teachers and scholars working in the field of composition and writing studies have long been interested in what has typically been character ized as student" resistance." Our professional literature is replete with attempts to document the seemingly inevitable struggles between in structors and students and to render visible the agonistic relations played out in the classroom. Indeed, the representation of the classroom as a site of conflict and resistance has been powerfully present to those who would tell the story of composition from at least as far back as A. S. Hill's mournful register in 1889 that his Harvard students" complain of what they stigmatize as a system of'repression"'in the writing classroom (101). Such a preoccupation continues to the present day, as Marguerite Helmers documents in her recent and quite brilliant report on how the contributors to the" Staff Interchange" forum in CCC have consistently (and over nearly twenty-five years of time) constructed the typical student as beset by problems which are" made manifest by their apparent resistance to pedagogy"(6). 1 One could easily ascribe the omnipresence of this narrative to composition's long and intensely held orientation toward a" practitioner" based knowledge that inherently foregrounds the dynamics of actual? and not idealized? classrooms (North). In fact, one might even regard this trait as a virtue and a sign that the composition community is deeply interested in hearing? and responding to? the voices of its students. But I am less concerned here with disciplinary self-congratulation than with what the incessant return to the theme of student resistence says about our professional lives in the classroom and what it reveals about our conceptualizations of the pedagogical enterprise itself. I believe there is something vitally important in these narratives, some thing that emerges out of the heart of our professional self-understand ing and that shapes the organization of power and interpersonal rela tions in the classroom. It is the purpose of this essay to take seriously these narratives of resistance and to consider in particular what they suggest about the instructor's role in these stories. Resistance, it turns out, may very well be something of a two-way street, and to understand