A moral revisioning of resistance

We recently completed a two-year qualitative study aimed at understanding the phenomenon of resistance in middle school. The study was approached ethnographically, as we participated in more than 500 hours of classroom and school life. In addition to gathering data, we were involved in teaching and learning with the students as well as recurring conversations with parents and other teachers.

We conducted this research with seven participants in grade seven and their parents and past teachers. Public, or overt, forms of resistance included refusing to comply with the demands of school tasks or teachers, skipping school, and instigating "trouble." As one participant told us, "If I'm bored and the teacher is giving us too much work, I like to walk around and start some trouble." The most obvious and spectacular form of resistance involved power plays that often began with a teacher's simple request followed by a student's denial that escalated into a fullblown confrontation. More-subtle and lessvisible forms of resistance included nonsanctioned, yet nondisruptive behaviors such as pretending to be working while actually reading a novel or passing notes.

At times, we felt these forms of student resistance were desirable and appropriate; and at others, unwarranted and destructive. Sometimes, student resistance filled us with hope, when students worked conscientiously against unjust conditions; at other times, we despaired over rude, disrespectful, and mean-spirited behaviors (Field and Olafson 1999). In other words, student resistance manifested itself as a complex, contradictory, and multilayered phenomenon. Resistance, we found, was not just about school tasks and teachers; it was constructed in the home, the street, and the workplace. As we reflected, we were ambivalent about the problem and unable to satisfactorily resolve how things might be different. The absence of possibilities provided the impetus for this study.

PURPOSE AND PERSPECTIVE

Working from poststructuralist resistance theory, especially the work of Foucault (1977; 1978; 1980), we were able to "lay bare the apparatus" and identify the play of power and resistance. In retrospect, we found that poststructuralist resistance theory has failed to take into account the moral complexity that surrounded much of the resistance we observed. Rather, context mattered, as did event, intention, and temporality-the pushes and pulls brought to bear on action by the past, present, and future. So did "goodness." Yet we acknowledged that, in daring to think about a better life, we were simply being nostalgic, naive, and thoroughly "modern." Had we reduced all truth to an infinite play of power that no one initiated or could be held responsible for? Had we reduced the world to a kind of macabre play in which puppets suspended cruelly by invisible wires danced to some unknown tune in the head of an invisible, all-seeing, but nonexistent and unaddressable puppeteer? If we don't lay bare the "awful apparatus," are we simply engaging in some kind of Foucaultian immorality, hiding how things really work from unsuspecting "cultural dopes" and deliberately averting our gaze? Questions like these left us feeling unsatisfied and disempowered by our study. We had the distinct sense that we had not gotten it "right." We had accurately represented a phenomenon, but ethically had we helped our participants imagine and enact a better life?

As Jackson, Boostrom, and Hansen (1993) argued, much of what goes on in schools is morally significant, especially when considering resistance. Many instances of resistance are associated with a school's moral code-its rules and regulations-and the ways teachers interpret and enact this code when interacting with students. We offer a moral revisioning of resistance, grounded in our previous research but attempting to read the human condition more generously.

THEORETICAL FRAMEWORK

Our theoretical framework, poststructuralist resistance theory, views resistance as socially constructed and (partially) agentic (Collins 1995). Resistance exists in multiple forms (Ferrell 1995), sometimes as an ideologically organized and inherently political expression of power (Miron and Lauria 1995), sometimes as a game of pleasure (Foucault 1978), and other times as a brute response to being demeaned and persecuted. In this view, resistance is intimately connected with the exercise of power, the use of language, and the formation of personhood (Collins 1995). As Miron and Lauria (1995, 30) noted, student resistance "specifically concerns 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."

We also used Foucault's (1980) theory of power, recognizing that power is something that circulates. It cannot be appropriated as a commodity; it is employed and exercised through a netlike organization; and individuals are always in the position of simultaneously undergoing and exercising power. If power is everywhere, so too is resistance; no relations of power exist without resistance. The vast network of relationships within the school-between teachers and students, among students, and the larger-order relations of power that govern an institution-give rise to forms of resistance in response to different forms of power. This framework allowed us to demonstrate how resistance is located simultaneously in the play of power between people, in the "bureaucratic proceduralism" of the school, and in the isolated, disciplinary approach to school subjects. These multiple expressions of resistance are often in response to what people perceive to be insensitive, legislative, and, in the case of school work, irrelevant ways to approach human conduct and relationships.