Resistance and Contestation

In curriculum studies, resistance and contestation refer more generally to the cultivation of dissenting positions on what is taught, the perspective from which it is taught, how it is taught, and how learners might be inculcated into challenging or refusing to accept dominant perspectives and ideologies.

In working toward a theory of resistance that informs curriculum studies, Henry Giroux makes the crucial distinction with oppositional behavior that he regards as being located too much in individual acts of contestation and defiance, and as such, miss the larger political sources of causation. The genesis of oppositional behavior is seen as residing in individual pathologies and deficits students bring with them to schools personally or as a result of family background or upbringing. Resistance, on the other hand, takes a much wider and deeper view of the reasons for success and failure in schooling. Particular groups are considered to be differently equipped to respond to the hidden curriculum of schooling.

Giroux points to three ways in which resistance is more complicated than it might appear at first glance. First, subordinate groups are not caught up in schools in a static web of hapless exploitation, which dooms them to inevitable failure. Rather, they often bring rich and diverse experiences that enable them in various ways to creatively subvert the reproductive agenda of schooling. Second, the point has to be acknowledged that power never operates only in a downward directionthere are always moments and spaces from within which marginalized groups can effectively push back through their creative responses. Third, thinking about resistance in this way and how it might be given expression through curriculum studies, provides a more hopeful and optimistic way of regarding schooling for the most marginalized groups, rather than dwelling only on aspects of pessimism and despair.

As part of his attempt to present a theory of resistance, Giroux proposes the need for clarity of criteria against which the existence of resistance can be properly judged. The major criteria proposed is that resistance should exhibit as its guiding principle the notion of emancipation or the extent to which there is evidence of a refusal to accept forms of domination and submission. Envisaged in this way, resistance displays elements of criticism, challenge, revelation, and exposure of contradiction, along with active plans for personal and social reconstruction.

When applied to schools, and curriculum studies in particular, resistance can also often take on a fuller meaning. It refers to a systematic unwillingness by some young people, especially those from minority or class backgrounds different from that of the middle class institution of schooling, to accept as legitimate the authority structures of schooling. There is an interesting history to this struggle over legitimacy, particularly as it relates to high schools. This genesis goes back at least as far as Willard Waller's classic work, The Sociology of Teaching. Waller argued that because of the nature of authoritative relationships built into schools, conflict was inevitable. On the one hand, Waller said, there was the adult culture of which teachers are the bearers or the relay, and on the other hand, there is the much more indigenous culture of youth, students, and young people. The two of these are continually in a state of uneasy tension over the struggle for supremacy. Phillip Cusick's study Inside High School sought to cast light on a deeper understanding of how high school students make sense of schooling. He found that students actively define an identity for themselves, and this is often against the formal organizational culture and the identity made for them by the school.

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