Wilton S. Wright, "Rewriting Resistance to Social Justice Pedagogies" (Lexington Books, 2024)
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Welcome to the New Books Network. Hello and welcome. My name is Michael Johnston. I'm a host of New Books and Sociology, a channel on the New Books Network. And today I am meeting with

Dr. Wilton Wright, assistant professor of English here at William Penn University, to talk about his brand new book, Rewriting Resistance to Social Justice Pedagogies, Student Engagement in the Composition Classroom, published in 2024. And by Lexington Books. I have a book published by Lexington also, so I've worked closely with them, a great press group.

So, that being said, welcome to the show, Wubbam. Thank you for having me. I really appreciate it, Dr. Johnson. Excellent. So, I guess to start off with, can we talk a bit more about the...

about what led you to write this piece on resistance and social justice pedagogies? Yeah, so it's kind of two intersecting things. Some of the research comes from my dissertation, although the book is not my dissertation. But with my dissertation, I was thinking about engaging students who were traditionally resistant to specifically feminist pedagogies,

and ways to appeal to them. The university that I got my PhD at had a big conservative student population. And my contention is that feminist pedagogies benefit everybody, not just certain groups of people. And I was really interested in how I could get that message to students who would typically hear the word feminism and think that it doesn't apply to them or even stronger reactions that we could imagine, right?

And so that was kind of, you know, that was what I did my dissertation on and finished in 2020. And that was in the back of my mind, you know, after you get done with your dissertation, a lot of people don't want to see that again. And after a conference, a virtual conference that I did in, I can't remember what year, 2020 or 2021, someone from Lexington Books, whose name I'm not going to remember, bad me, reached out to me. They saw the conference abstract and

and asked me if I had a book idea. And I didn't have anything on the topic that I covered in that conference, but I did have this sort of idea of resistance in the back of my mind.

And especially because moving from my previous institution where I got my PhD to here, and I say here because Michael and I, we teach at the same university at William Penn University, but moving here to Iowa, there was a difference in the kinds of resistance I was experiencing. And, you know, not to place a value on like one resistance was better or worse or harder or easier or whatever, but they were just very, very different kinds of resistance. Right.

And so that was in my mind and kind of thinking about the work I'd done on my dissertation that led me to dig more deeply into the idea of resistance specifically and resistance to, you know, feminist pedagogies and queer pedagogies and anti-racist pedagogies and, and,

And then just really start reaching and doing some multidisciplinary research on resistance. Excellent. So the book is about resistance and about pedagogy. So it's about teaching and learning in the classroom and the experience that you had, the varying experiences that you had between a private school and a public school in Texas. I think both of them were. But to start off with, what is resistance? Resistance.

So that's a loaded question, right? Like, and that's one of the things that the book kind of grapples with, especially in the early chapters is there's this great quote. I'm gonna see if I can find at least, at least a paraphrase. There's this great quote from these composition scholars who were contributed to an edited collection that was about resistance in composition. This was the 2001. That was when the book came out.

And Gary Olson mentioned that without sort of understanding the definition or coming to a consensus on the definition of resistance, I think he called it floating into oblivion. The term would kind of become, it would float into oblivion and become a disciplinary cliched avoid a meeting. And in that same volume, John Trimber also said that resistance was becoming a floating signifier. One of those, like everyone recognizes it in context.

And so that's kind of where I'm coming from with, and, you know, this is why I'm not defining it right off the bat, right? Because resistance is many things. There are like in critical pedagogy, which is sort of, you know, a really key piece of pedagogy and composition and other disciplines, right?

Resistance is what education does. Like education resists systems of power. It resists systems of sexism, racism, you know, and capitalism, things like that, the corporate university. But often when we talk about resistance now, we're talking about students who are in some way disruptive in class. I have a very long definition from the book that I could read you.

But and I will if you if you'd like me to. But I think the takeaway about the definition of resistance for me is that resistance is an act of agency for students. And it can look a lot of like a lot of different things. It can be those sort of moments of students being angry about something or disrupting class in some way.

But much more often, it's body language, it's silence, it's looking at the phone, it's wearing headphones in class, it's some kind of disconnection. And that's probably the majority. And one of the things that researchers found, I can't remember, there's a book that I have here somewhere. It's called Why Students' Resistance, Interdisciplinary Approach to Resistance. But one thing they found in educational psychology was that

Many students who would be we would think of as resisting don't know they're resisting and or don't think they are resisting. Right. They don't think they're resistors. So that's kind of a long answer to a short question. But essentially, resistance is, in my in my estimation, an active agency on students where resistance.

Yeah. So one of the things that I noticed, though, is you did not say, um, student resistance or student resistors or something similar. Um,

And instead you use students who resist.

Why the why students who resist rather than resistors and student resistance and student resistors? So that's that's a great question. One of the first things I noticed when I started doing resistance research, multidisciplinary resistance research, is there's very little that actually talks about how we name and discuss students who resist. And the term students who resist is clunky.

It just is. But what I was thinking about when people use the term resistors or resistant students or disruptors, which is a term that you read more in sort of primary and secondary education research that talks about student resistance. But when you use those terms, it unintentionally perhaps attaches resistance to student identity so that like they are resistors, right? Students are inherently resistors. It's some sort of facet of their identity.

But the truth is that everybody resists. Everybody can, is capable of resisting. And very likely everybody does resist at some point. And that's teachers, that's students, that's, you know, we could expand it to outside the classroom. So resistance isn't something that rests in students. It can be an action. And one of my goals was saying students who resist, although it's a clunky term and maybe there's a better one out there, you know,

It gives it acknowledges student agency. So it's an action that students do, but it doesn't attach that to their identity. It doesn't say resistance is the student's identity. It's just something that sometimes happens in classrooms. Oh.

And so that was kind of the reason that I used that term specifically. Yeah. So that's what I was actually going to be my next question. Like, can faculty resist as well? And and the important piece, I think, that is, what is it that makes us capable of resistance? What is it that drives that resistance?

Is it solely who we are or is it an aspect or a part of who we are? It's quite interesting. I find resistance quite fascinating. I think maybe even I do it sometimes. Are there topics that I choose to

spend less time on? Or are there certain topics that I just choose not to give attention to in class? And is that a part of my resistance? So what is it that makes me capable of doing this? What is it that creates this persistence? Yes. And you're 100% right. Anyone can resist. Faculty can resist. There's probably an interesting project

that delves more into the ways that faculty resist. And then some of the research, specifically about composition studies, kind of confronts that those ways

The ways that professor identity can be seen as a form of resisting students, of not acknowledging students, of not acknowledging their humanity, acknowledging their autonomy, their agency, things like that. The way that we sometimes use the term resistance to kind of just mean students that we don't agree with or students that we think are not giving us what they should or not doing what they should in the classroom.

So I think professors, a lot of times when you read about professors and resistance, it's focusing on that sort of critical pedagogy that I mentioned, like Henry Giroux, one of the foundations of critical pedagogy, writes about education as resistance. So professors are important in helping students understand how we can resist these power structures that affect the university, but also affect people on individual and collective levels. So

So I think everybody's capable of resistance. And there are a lot of things that can cause resistance. You know, the question I think you asked is what causes resistance? And I'll talk a little bit about it, but...

I think the thing that we go to first, or at least in the scholarship that I read, a lot of what we think about first with resistance is ideological resistance. So if I talk about feminism, a conservative student is going to resist that. That's my assumption, right? Or if I talk about anti-racism, a conservative student is going to resist that. And then you can get more specific, right? Like students resist these different topics for different reasons.

I actually believe, although I do think that that kind of resistance is on the rise, you know, in our current political moment where education is seen as indoctrination and there's kind of an anti-education movement. I think that kind of resistance is on the rise. But I don't think that that's the most prominent form of resistance. I don't think it's even kind of close, honestly, because although there may be ideologically motivated resistances, so most of the time we're not getting that active disruption of class, right?

And so resistance can be engagement. I taught when I was at my Ph.D. institution, I taught a woman in gender studies class with a more advanced instructor. We co-taught it. And there was one man in that class and he asked a lot of questions. Right. And for some of the students, you could tell sometimes it was frustrating because he was a man in a gender studies class who was taking a lot of the attention, which is an issue sometimes.

But at the same time, when we framed it as interest, as engagement, it doesn't mean he's going to agree with everything, but it gives us a way to move forward. Right. So sometimes resistance is engagement. Even anger sometimes is engagement with material. And resistance can also come from this. Again, that book that I mentioned about why students resist.

I think it was organizational psychology did some research into resistant reasons that students resist. And it had a lot of it, the way that students report talking about resistance was professor behavior. So, you know, unclear policies or unfair policies that they determined to be unfair, slow or bad grading, grading policies that they deemed to be unfair. So,

And then just sort of classroom conduct or things like that. Right. So there are a lot of things that cause resistance. And I think sometimes, you know, even just boredom can cause forms of resistance. Like there's, you know, none of us can completely be in the moment 100 percent of the time. That's what we want from our students. But it's not realistic because, you know, if we've been into if you've been to a faculty meeting, you know,

You know, even we can't always be completely 100% present for all of that. So I think there's just a ton of reasons that students resist. And it doesn't do us well to think of resistance in this one box and in this one area. And in fact, one of the things that one of my significant arguments or one of the things that I think is most important in the book is that I believe that

We need to define resistance within our local context. So within our disciplinary context, within our university context, within our even regional and geographic context, our political context.

But at the same time, we don't need to have one single definition of resistance because I think that one single definition of resistance is both impossible and not desirable because of all the stuff that I've been talking about so far. Work management platforms, endless onboarding, IT bottlenecks, admin requests. But what if things were different? Monday.com is different.

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Galaxy S25 Ultra, the AI companion that does the heavy lifting so you can do you. Get yours at Samsung.com. Compatible with select apps requires Google Gemini account results may vary based on input check responses for accuracy. Yeah, and so the interesting piece about that is like not all resistance is the same across time or place and not all of the things that we resist are the same or necessarily fixed or hard in ways of thinking because we as humans are complex and the experiences that we have across time

Time, very. So, yeah, have you experienced some of this differentiation in terms of what and when things are resisted? And maybe what some of the other reasons of resistance might be beyond ideology or just socialization?

situational experiences. Yeah. So one of the things I did in the book, just as a way to kind of get myself into each chapter was I included stories from my teaching about different students that I've encountered. I changed their names and things like that, but different stories that I've encountered because, you know, I've been teaching at the college level for 17 years now, and I've taught at three different universities. One was

State school in Texas, 35,000-ish students. So really big, very diverse school. And then a midsize private university, about 10,000 to 11,000 students, much less diverse, very upper class.

middle class and high and wealthy students. And then here, you know, and again here, William Penn University with around a thousand students, very diverse, geographically diverse and things like that. And what I noticed across those three different places is that resistance was different. Like now there are obviously like kinds of resistance that you can see anywhere, right? There are resistances that cross these sort of

boundaries of geography and types of institutions and diverse and things like that. But the trends that I saw in those classes was very different. And I'll tell a story, one that you actually mentioned when we were talking about this before was about a student that I had early in my when I was teaching, one of the first three or four years of teaching. I don't remember precisely when, but it

It was a student who was a really sharp writer. And then like happens a lot of times, first semester freshmen kind of dropped off in the second half of the semester, just disappeared. And this was at the first institution I taught at. So 35,000 students, I'm not going to track them down. I can send them emails, but there's not really, there's not really infrastructure for going to find him and, you know, like things like that. And so I just, you know, I wouldn't say I wrote them off. Like I sent him emails periodically. I kind of told him things, you know, that kind of stuff.

And one of the things that he came towards the end of the semester and he was like, what I kind of do to catch up. And I was like, nothing. I mean, you know, you kind of stop turning stuff in and like you haven't been in class. And so there's not really anything. And then he told me his story and his story was he was a new father, you know, 18, 19 year old new father who was working nights in a bar.

And it was struck me that like I had this idea of the student of being a bright student who got disconnected from university, as happens so often. Right. With first year freshmen.

And that assumption meant that I was missing an important part of his, of his story. Right. And it kind of changed the trajectory of how I taught after that, because I felt, I felt like two things. One, I need to be more flexible because I, I, that just didn't feel right. And I, and we worked something out so that he could finish the class and get at least a seed to pass. And he did. I, if I remember correctly.

But it kind of changed another thing because I don't think he should have had to tell me his story in order to get that. So the point that I'm making with this probably overly long story was that I thought this student was sort of passively resisting, kind of just disconnecting from the university, disconnecting from the class, whatever it was, as students sometimes do.

And my perception of that resistance changed because there was, you know, he had a whole different life, a whole complex life that he was living outside of the university. Something that at the time, you know, in my mid-20s, I had no idea about. Like, it was not something that was on my radar.

And, um, so that, that really changed the way that I thought about resistance. And there are a couple other stories like that. You know, um, I had a student who I thought was, uh, silently resistant. So sort of body language position, you know, sitting in the back of the class kind of turned away a lot in the corner, um, didn't talk much. I had him for one class in the next semester, um,

He was one of the biggest contributors in class and sat in the front row. And again, it just sort of poked holes in those ideas of what resistance is and how our teaching affects students and what their attitudes in class even mean. Because I don't think we always know that. Even if we have a ton of experience, we don't always know what those moments of resistance are about.

So what I'm hearing is, is that, uh, some of the resistance for both faculty members and for students. So that student saw himself as a new father being expected to potentially, uh, based on the behavior alone. My speculation is that a narrative that he was familiar with is my job is to take care of my child. My job is to be at home with my kid. And even if that means sacrificing coming to class and then the narrative that, uh,

You may have known at that time is, well, he's bluffing off. He's falling off at midterm, which a lot of students do. So he's probably falling into that category of the other of those other students without knowing any additional information to allow you to resist such an assumption being made.

Absolutely. Yeah. So that being said, what are some forms of pedagogy that you have put into place to allow for greater flexibility for these different narratives that don't always stand out because we're not familiar with them? Yeah. One thing I do now, you know, having taught for a long time is, is

I feel a lot more comfortable being flexible with deadlines. I'm a writing teacher, so revision is a huge part of the writing classes in general. So I feel really comfortable with that. That's not something that I tell everybody they need to do because I think pedagogy works best when it is done.

It comes from your identity and comes from what you're comfortable with. If you're a real rules-based person and you feel like that's an important part of the pedagogy, then, you know, stick to your deadlines and stick to your rules. But that's something that I've done is I give students a lot of leeway. Like there are limits, of course, when students come to me week 14 of a 16-week semester and they want to catch up, you know, that's a little bit late. But I have that flexibility. I allow myself and I allow students that flexibility to change. Yeah.

And so and that and what I always tell them is that they can tell me what they feel comfortable telling me. They can tell me if they want it. They want it. They want me to know their story because that's going to help them make a plan and figure out how to how to go forward. And I'm always there for that. But they don't owe me that. They don't owe me their story. They don't owe me their personal details. They don't owe me their personal life. They get the leniency.

whether or not they tell me the story. The main thing that I do is I just, we have to come up with a plan. Like it has, I'm not, I don't like indefinite deadlines. So that's one thing that kind of, so I guess my resistance, right? If we're thinking about faculty resistance to students, that's one thing that I did to kind of disrupt my resistance to students was to not require them to tell me their life story in order to get leniency and then build in these opportunities for how they can go about their

turning in late work, revisions, whatever it is, even without that. And I'm not sure if you're asking about pedagogy to disrupt resistance. If not, I can pause and we can talk about that in a little while too. No, I think you're right on in terms of some ways in which you can add for greater flexibility in the pedagogy and allowing for them to be able to

know that resistance is all right. But here are some ways in which we can make this classroom work for you because I don't know what your resistance is for, right? And so then coming to you and asking for forgiveness and building in some grace within the syllabus, within your

within your rules of the classroom, because that was going to be my next question, right? Resistance and identity. Resistance can be part of your identity, but it can also be a product of something else, of not knowing, of not knowing any other narrative of possibility.

Like one of the things that I'm able to do here at William Pitt University, and you might feel the same way because of the small classroom environment, that there's a little bit more room for individualized teaching and being able to allow for flexibility and to work at the strengths of the individual student.

rather than just treating everybody as a single product, which you might have to do if you have, say, 50 people in a composition class. And I'm not a composition professor, but that just doesn't seem very fun to have that many students in their learning composition at the same time, which then you'd have a set of standards and everybody would be graded by that. But to be able to give some

some nuance from one student to the next and to be able to say, Hey, you don't have to tell me your story. But, you know, thank you for coming to me and being open and honest. I'm able to work with you now about just pretty simply coming up to me and asking for, you know, a bit of forgiveness. Yeah. And I want to say two things. One is that like,

I don't, you know, unless the student does something actively disruptive or, you know, maybe, which rarely happens, insults another student or something like that. I don't, I don't want, I don't need them to ask forgiveness most of the time. Like if they plagiarize or, or something like that, then, you know, even then I don't ask them, I don't ask for apology, but I can understand why, you know, that would be, that would be useful because, you know, they violated the code of conduct.

So forgiveness really isn't much of a part. Like I don't really ask for students to, they don't need forgiveness very often in my classes. But the thing that I really want to hone in on is you talked about the ability to work with students one-on-one. And one of the things that really helped me as a young teacher, especially, was understanding that not all students want to get A's and they don't need to.

you know, as, as, you know, as a high achiever, right? Like I got a PhD, obviously I like this stuff. This is, this is the thing. This is a huge part of my identity being an academic and, and being good at academics. Um,

You know, it was outside of my... I didn't understand that perspective. But as a teacher, you know, there are all reasons, all sorts of reasons why students are in your classroom, mostly to fulfill a requirement, right? Most of them aren't there because, my goodness... Well, you know, you teach a lot of sociology classes. They might actually be in there because they really want to learn from you, you know? But with comp classes, they're just in a comp class most of the time and they have to take the comp class. So...

understanding that there are a variety of reasons, the goals that students have for class and reasons for being in a class and then making it okay for different levels of engagement. Like I always tell my, especially my comp students that the class is,

depends so much on their contributions. Like there's only so much I can bring to the class. They have to bring something for it to be worthwhile. And one of the things I've been saying a lot lately, which is just like, whether you believe something will be useful for you or not, you're probably right. So if you go into a class thinking this is a useless class, it's probably gonna be pretty useless for you. But if you go into the class with the attitude of

this class is going to be useful because I'm going to make it useful. It will almost certainly be useful for you. So I think that, and again, I think that the ability to do that individualized attention is a privilege that not everybody gets. You know, I have colleagues and friends who,

have taught like seven, seven load. And that individual. And so even if the class sizes are still in the, you know, in the twenties, that's an insane amount of grading and time in the classroom and things like that. And we do have a high, you know, a teaching load of four, four plus, you know, whatever else we teach.

But we do have that ability to work with students one-on-one, and that's just so incredibly important both as sort of a pedagogical tool for disrupting resistance of a lot of kinds, like being able to talk to students as human beings one-on-one.

it doesn't always work, right? It doesn't always mean that they're going to succeed in class, but it, it helps break that sort of barrier between student and professor that is necessary in some ways, but is also kind of hinders that engagement, I think. And then I think that topic of like, what can you get out of the classroom? Not necessarily an A might be a counteraction to the resistance that could come from, uh,

from social justice pedagogies, what I mean by that in particular is that then they may feel the ability to be heard, which is what I'm hearing a lot of from students, not necessarily ID and an A, but I want to be heard. I want to be listened to by my professor and by other students, even if you don't agree with me. Yeah, absolutely. And I think that's really essential because

You know, we teach, I teach classes that, you know, in my composition classes, they cover a range of topics. Like we, we sometimes do documentary films and talk about issues within documentary films, but, and that changes semester to semester and stuff like that. But especially like literature and rhetoric classes, when I teach them, you know, the, the students might read something and, and, and be confronted with something that they politically disagree with. And, and,

Although right in this political and historical moment, sometimes it feels impossible to reach across the difference and reach across specifically ideological and political difference.

We keep trying, you know, we keep trying to do it. We keep trying to insist that there can be a world where we talk to each other and we listen to each other. And sometimes, and sometimes that doesn't work because there are the, like I said earlier that I don't think the ideological resistances are the most common, but they are there. They're certainly present and it's certainly an important part of resistance and

And sometimes what that means is students just fully shut down, like when they hear feminist or anti-racist or queer or whatever. And no matter what the context is for that, you know, feminist pedagogy, you may know is a lot of it has to do with like valuing student agency, like literally just believing that students have something meaningful to contribute to class. And that's sort of a fundamental principle.

And that's a feminist pedagogy. And that's so ingrained in composition pedagogy that it's become ubiquitous. Right. But it's sort of critical and feminist pedagogies have those beliefs central to them. So in any case, like those resistances will happen. And those sort of shutting down kind of resistances, sometimes you can't break through. But we keep trying. You know, we keep trying. Like that's all we can do.

Yeah, so I have one more question that I have time for for your book. And then I have a question that I always have to ask my guests on the show. But this last one related to the book is syllabi. I begrudgingly write them every semester knowing that they're never going to be perfect, but

Like the books that we write and the articles we publish, we eventually have to come to a point and let go of our babies and send them off to, well, in this case, our dean and put them away so that when HLC comes around, they know that we're writing these syllabi books.

You know, are there any recommendations for how we could design a syllabi that may reduce the likelihood of our students resisting? And especially in these courses where there is a social justice pedagogy being presented in the classroom, talking about these sensitive topics that, you know, that often come with feminist theory. Yeah.

So I hadn't thought about the idea of like syllabi as ways to intercede and resistance. So I think my answer will be very partial here. I actually don't put a lot about like what the pedagogy that I'm teaching with is in the syllabus. In literature and rhetoric classes, it's going to come through more in the subjects on the course calendar and things like that.

mostly when we talk about like i'm very open with my pedagogy because i believe that um not being open is is i wouldn't say dishonest because i think there are some professors who kind of hide hide their politics for very important and significant reasons but it doesn't feel right to me right so i keep that stuff very open about what i believe and um my my attitude towards students and then uh

the sort of methods that I use and why I use them. But I think there probably is an opportunity in the syllabi to talk about student contributions to class and how the ownership that they can have over the way the course is conducted. I'm teaching three Comp 2 classes this semester, which our school is focusing on research, academic research and argumentation.

And every one of those classes is we're only two weeks in, but every one of those classes is going to be different in some way because the makeup of the class is different. And the time of the day, like one of them is at 815 and that 815 class is going to be a little bit more tired. And, you know, one of them is right after lunch. And so, you know, and then, of course, like the students in the class themselves make a difference. And so I think maybe even emphasizing, you know, again, with.

All of those pedagogies I've mentioned, critical pedagogy, feminist pedagogy, anti-racist pedagogy, queer pedagogies, all of those pedagogies emphasize student...

as knowledge creators. And it's different forms and fashions. They have different approaches to it. And student agency is incredibly important in all of those pedagogies. So maybe in the syllabus, making it more explicit, the role that students have. Are students going to read those syllabi? Maybe not. But it's another thing that we can talk about in class, right? When we go over the syllabus, we can talk about the role that

students have in co-creating the knowledge in the class and then not just in the knowledge in the class, but the class flow and making it interesting or fun or making it kind of like a grind, you know, which sometimes it happens. So I think there's more to say there. I don't think that's a really complete answer, but that's just where my mind went first. Imagine what's possible when learning doesn't get in the way of life.

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Oh, definitely. And I think something there might be also there with the assignments that we choose, right? Making sure that we represent all of the different students and the talents that they're able to bring to the class. Like I have students doing podcast reviews where they listen to podcasts and they review them rather than having to read a whole book or a whole article that's 20 or 30 pages that speaks in a language that they may not speak in.

And then I was also, you know, what about textbooks? Are you selective in your textbooks to make sure that you're selecting books that represent the different beliefs and values of the students?

So writing textbooks are, I don't want to say anything too bad about them. Like they, they actually do. I think, I think most writing textbooks do that pretty well where they, um, a lot of writing textbooks analyze particular kinds of speech and particular kinds of essays. And they talk about different purposes of writing and styles of writing and things like that. Um,

I, I don't, the way that I use them is mostly as textbooks is like points of reference for the things that we're talking about in class. And then sometimes we use them for shared activities and things like that. So today, like we did visual analysis exercise on one of the class and one of my composition classes, and we're using images that were in, in the book. So.

So I think the books do a decent job of that. I think there are a lot of, especially like textbooks that are going out to, you know, with composition classes, tens of thousands of students potentially over years. They're going to assume that students are going to have a variety of different knowledge levels and then also, you know, ideological, political commitments, things like that.

So I think the textbook could, but I do, I like the assignment idea too. I, in some of my classes, I teach what I call the create your own adventure assignment. And so I give them like, it's usually a final. I give them some parameters for what I want. I want a comprehensive final. I want it to be, you know, everybody contributes equally. I want, you know, often if it's a rhetoric or a literature class, like I want them to be doing text level analysis or a film class, like scene level analysis.

And then I let them design it right from the ground up. And it's interesting some of the stuff that comes out of those as well, you know. Yeah. So, you know, I might even see like some sort of a writing project, whether it be a book or a follow up, but, you know, recognition and resistance. So understanding, you know, resistance and as something that might come from a place of resistance.

excuse me, lack of recognition, the lack of recognition that they just don't know or the lack of recognition that they do have different beliefs and different values and recognizing people for who they are and where they're at and how their resistance isn't necessarily a product of who they are. It might simply be where they're at at this moment. Yeah. And that actually brings up a point about resistance that I didn't mention before, which is that sometimes resistance is

is an incongruity between what students think a class is and what it actually is. So like with active pedagogies, critical pedagogy, feminist, queer, anti-racist pedagogies that really involve student activity and knowledge making, sometimes students see that as classes where they're not taught anything.

And you have to be really explicit about like, this is the pedagogical goal of this class. Like the reason we're doing activities rather than me talking about specific knowledge is because I think that in our context, it works better to do something, to physically be, you know, researching and doing activities in class. And so sometimes there's resistance because they think that they don't understand the pedagogy. And if we don't explain it, they're not going to understand it. So I think that's a,

important thing that I didn't talk about earlier that you just brought up that's significant in the idea of resistance. So, Will, I really enjoyed this conversation about your book, and we barely started to even dive into the deeper chapters where you have a large amount of solutions and even real-world examples of your experiences in the classroom.

So, you know, again, this was rewriting resistance to social justice pedagogy, student engagement in the composition classroom. And honestly, we barely made it even past like chapter two, right? And some of the stuff that we've talked through, but I don't want to give away the whole book. It's definitely a very worthy read for new teachers, regardless of the discipline, but also, you know,

Also for people in writing and, you know, how to engage the students, because I think that crucial to, you know, almost any discipline, because I'm sure there's one out there, but I think writing is crucial. And I think the ability to engage with writing and engage with reading to reading and writing go hand in hand. I think that we would probably agree with that.

I think that it is a valuable book for anyone. So thank you for being here with me today on the show to talk more about your book. So a dying question that I have that I always have to ask my guests is, what are you working on now? While we put one book away, while we put one baby away, what's the next thing that you've picked up? And I know you have some youngins at home that you're focusing on right now, but also what else?

Yeah, so last semester was, it was an interesting semester because my wife gave birth to our second son. And so there was not really any research being done. I was kind of just keeping my head above water last semester. I also took on some extra class, some of her classes when she went on maternity leave. Right now, I'm working on

an idea for a conference panel, actually. We're thinking about the New Media Division, which I'm not a part of, but I work with a lot. We're thinking about doing a panel for a Midwest Popular Culture Association that talks about the film that came to campus, to William Penn, like Max Leonidas' film, and looking at it from different academic angles. And I haven't really gotten anywhere yet because we just found...

a conference that is going to work, that this would work at. So I'm in, I'm thinking about specifically student engagement and deeply localized context, which is a term that I use a lot in the book to talk about resistance, deeply localized resistance context. But I'm thinking about like how understanding our deeply localized context as a small liberal arts university in the rural Midwest, um,

bringing a filmmaker to campus who made a film partially on campus. And I'm thinking it's sort of how we can think about student engagement in that context. And that's really where my head is at right now is with the deeply localized context. And what does that mean? Because I really, that was something that really resonated with me. You know, when we write stuff like

I don't know about you, but whenever I write stuff, I go through phases where it's like, this is great. I feel like I'm doing something important. And then you read it and you're like, man, this is the worst thing ever. And then you're like, oh, okay, here's some ideas that really stick with me. And that's one of the ones that sticks with me. So I think that's where I'm heading right now is with like, what else can I think about in terms of deeply localized educational contexts? Yeah.

That's awesome. You know, I think about your, you know, choose your own story, choose your own journey. It almost sounds something like that. Like, so not only does the student see themselves in the film, but they also use the film to help guide their learning and guide their behavior, just as a person might ritualistically see religion, religion being, you know, highly symbolic of what they believe, but then practicing it at the same time. So,

So something that guides but also reinforces through behavior. So being in the film but also using the film as a part of who they are and what their identity is. Yeah. Excellent.

Well, I definitely hope that this turns out into a much larger project and maybe your next book even, right? Like a collective co-written book between you and the rest of the media group. And, you know, the Midwest Popular Culture Association is one that I took a year and I was a member of and have often thought about going to myself. I know it was a new project.

Maybe in New Jersey once, if I remember correctly. They're going to be in Iowa this year. That was the kind of impetus. They're at University of Iowa this year. That was sort of like, it was like a light bulb. And what Sam and I were like, this is, we got to go to this. So.

When is it this year? October. Oh, I believe. Yeah. They haven't even done a CFP or anything like that. They just announced where it's going to be. But yeah. Excellent. I will have to definitely check it out and see if there's something that I can contribute. The cool part about that organization that I remember closely is that they allow for so many different subjects, so many different topics. And it's

And each of them had their own chair that looks over the papers that are submitted, which makes opportunities pretty endless to be able to get in and to present something.

I've always liked the pop, especially the regional pop culture conferences. Um, those are great. I'm not plugging those for any reason, but, um, you know, I've been to several regional pop culture conferences and they're always very accepting, uh, meaning like that when you're there, they, they, they are, uh, helpful and useful. And it's just a much friendlier environment than some academic conferences can be, uh,

and, and so I've always really valued those pop culture and they're just a lot of fun topics to, you know, you'll get, you get people who are talking about the things that they're really, really passionate about. And, and, um, so yeah, those, the looking forward to that, obviously nothing's come, we haven't done anything with it yet because we, we don't even know what the CFP is going to be, but. Well, thank you again for being part of this show. Thank you. And this, this has been another episode of new books and sociology. Uh, I'm Michael Johnston. And again, this is a channel of the new books network. Um,

Thank you and have a great day.