Student Resistance: A History of the Unruly Subject & Mulberry and Peach: Two Women of China. . - Teaching Notes - book review

Radical Teacher, Fall, 2002 by J. Elizabeth Clark

STUDENT RESISTANCE: A HISTORY OF THE UNRULY SUBJECT

By Mark Edelman Boren. New York Routledge, 2001. $19.95

MULBERRY AND PEACH: TWO WOMEN OF CHINA

By Hua-Ling Nieh. Translated By: Linda Lappin and Jane Parish Yang. New York: The Feminist Press, 1998. $12.95

I recently taught in a learning cluster for first year students at LaGuardia Community College. Our cluster, entitled "Youth, Identity and Culture," sought to look at the ways in which youth identity is socially constructed. The three duster teachers each employed a distinct disciplinary lens in his/her course--Introduction to Sociology, Exploring the Humanities and two English Courses, Composition I and The Research Paper. In the English courses, I paired Student Resistance and Mulberry and Peach to encourage students to think outside the current norms of youth culture. Many of the students I teach struggle with the conflicting material expectations of a media culture largely defined by upper-middle class white youth and my students' own particular identification with a racially and economically diverse urban youth culture. Their frame of reference jarringly juxtaposes Britney Spears with Sean "P. Diddy" Combs with Scooby Doo with J. Lo with Diesel and Gap clothes.

While composition courses often take on themes related to contemporary events, focused on the idea of asking students to write what they know about, leading them to a platform for critical thinking and cultural analysis, I wanted to add to that model, contrasting students' easy ability with pop culture with an altogether different construction of student identity. In the English courses we began with popular culture, first with music and film, and then made an intentional move from youth culture to student identity to student activism.

I asked students to read Student Resistance to begin to get a sense of how student communities were defined, the origin of those definitions, the history of student conflict, and the specific issue-oriented struggles that ignited student imaginations and sometimes changed the material, social, and historical circumstances of student life.

Student Resistance presents a panoramic view of student resistance that is a wide-ranging and quickly paced history of student struggle beginning with the "town and gown" clashes in medieval Europe and moving through a timeline of student resistance in Asia, Latin America, Europe, the Middle East, and the United States. While the students read the book, I assigned several smaller papers to help them think about connections between the history of student resistance and their own lives. At the beginning of the term I asked students to write their own activist history. If they didn't have an activist history, I asked them to reflect on why they hadn't been involved. Only one or two students in the class had been involved in any activism; others wrote about never having the idea presented to them by friends or family; a few others wrote about their disenchantment with the idea of activism.

As their reading continued, I asked students to think about what kind of student group they might form. They had to create ideological platforms for their groups and then, via our on-line course management system, Black Board, they had to solicit class members to join their groups (who then became their peer review groups). The groups ranged in topic from the S.R.P. (Stop Racial Profiling) to the Independent Thinkers Group (a group devoted to free thinking and free speech) to the Deaf Squad (a group devoted to issues of disability and perceptions of "normalcy"). Students began to talk in terms of issues of concern to them--tuition increases, CUNY's new policies about undocumented immigrants, financial aid--and to really fantasize where education might lead.

I then asked students to become familiar with one or two groups that interested them the most. In small groups, I asked them to identify why the groups were formed, what they did, and what they achieved. Students supplemented the information in the book with outside research. Then, students were asked to compare a group from the book to a contemporary student activist group. As students wrote their papers, they chose a variety of contemporary groups from those batling globalization to gay rights' groups to animal rights' groups to women's rights groups. In each case, students again saw connections between their lives and the lives of other student activists. Some students, however, remained critical of activism, seeing it as something historical and with little or no current relevance.

We moved from Student Resistance to Mulberry and Peach, a work of fiction that presents the story of a young woman, Mulberry, fleeing China for the United States. Through the course of the novel she ages into a middle-aged woman and also acquires a second personality, Peach. The novel is told in both Mulberry's voice, through diary entries, and Peach's voice, through letters she writes to an INS Agent, Mr. Dark. Students created two timelines, one for China from 1911 to the present and one for the United States during the same time period. Using research to fill in the significant historical events that serve as a backdrop for Mulberry's conflicted relationship with societal expectations in China and Peach's desperate acceptance of the possibilities of freedom in the United States, students analyzed this text to make some analyses of how culture affects identity.