Below is the text of my keynote talk for the Open Technology in Education, Society and Scholarship Association given on Tuesday, May 17th, 2022. A recording of the talk will be published later. The slides to the talk are here.
Welcome
I’m truly honored to have this opportunity to be in community with you today. I want to thank the OTESSA organizing committee of Valerie Irvine, Terry Greene, Aras Bozkurt and Kathy Snow for the kind invitation to speak.
Getting to this moment has been a process. Not just for me, I imagine, but for all of us. What have we each done and needed to do in order to be here, be present, right at this current moment?
Pause for a minute and consider all the actions you and I have taken to be in the same time and space together. I’ve closed my door, arranged my lighting and tech set-up, cued up my slides, turned my phone off, closed up all those precious tabs in my browser, had a glass of water… and that’s just within the last hour.
Let’s take a moment to acknowledge the fact that however we got here, we relied on other people in ways large and small to make it possible.
Introduction
I chose this topic or perhaps I should say the topic chose me. Around the time that I proposed the title I was faced with a problem: several of my students were resisting my instruction in a lot of different ways. And truth be told, I was struggling in deciding how to deal with it.
So, this title alludes to not only my specific situation but also the never ending context of teaching and learning systems. Even as we pursue our interests and attempt to satisfy our curiosity as learners, we are also negotiating power dynamics. As educators tasked with the responsibility of conveying knowledge and engaging students’ thinking, it’s very common for us to experience learners who resist our pedagogical offerings. There’s hiding and there’s seeking. There’s movement and there’s stalling. There’s clarity and there’s confusion.
What I hope we can do together is consider several of the ways we interpret learner resistance and also acknowledge the both helpful and hopeful means we have to lessen its reach and impact in the classroom without diminishing the personhood of our students.
A necessary digression
One of the miracles of this particular interaction – that is, me, an elementary physical education specialist addressing you, an international audience of educators, scholars, thinkers with a particular interest in open technology and education – is how unlikely it is and would have been 15 or even 10 years ago.
I am here in no small part because of a collection of networked circumstances that flow through one specific digital platform: Twitter. Without Twitter, I doubt that I would have found the types of audience and community for my writing and thinking that have enabled me to appear before you now as a keynote speaker. This is not simply about follower counts or a niche form of mircocelebrity. Rather, my engagement on Twitter has been life-altering, life- enhancing and often life-giving. The friendships, deep conversations and ongoing connections that have arisen from showing up, showing myself and showing care mean the world to me. These are the connections that I bring to bear here, today. My intellectual world is broader, brighter and emotionally sustaining because of so many connections made on a certain bird app.
That means that the recent talk of new ownership has felt threatening and surprisingly personal. Without knowing exactly what’s ahead, recognizing the frailty and vulnerability of the neighborhoods that we’ve built online has been deeply sobering but not entirely surprising.
I say this as a Black educator of young children.
I say this as a Black American woman writer who no longer shies away from the mic.
I say this as an elementary educator who has formed deep, meaningful connections with colleagues across a spectrum of institutions and disciplines.
I say this as a middle-aged Black American woman contemplating the loss of a well curated, life-changing platform.
We can all still watch, wait and hope and against hope that the worst does not transpire. At the same time, let us have no illusions about the durability of for-profit platforms as reliable containers for our dreams of social justice.
I mention all this to situate my talk in a larger, yet distinctly personal context. While we contemplate learner refusal and resistance, I am also considering my own instances of resistance and willingness to adapt to new situations.
Throughout this talk, you’ll notice that I have feelings about all of these things.
A note about the images on the slides: several of these are photographs that I have digitally altered with LunaPic to offer an artistic flair and also to preserve the privacy of my students. It means a lot to be able to share my students and our spaces with you in this way.
About me in PE
As you’ve heard, I am a PE specialist at the elementary level. Telling you about my context must also contend with the overt and covert associations happening in your mind with regard to the topic of “elementary physical education.” Consciously or not, a compare and contrast machine is running in the background. Our sense-making relies on calling forth whatever resources our minds have to offer at the moment. Before I continue, I want to ask you to please respond to this prompt:
What comes up for you when you think back to your own childhood experiences in PE?
If you’re willing, please share your reflection in the chat.
Asking adults this question is often fraught. Elementary PE can bring up really awful things for some folks, I know. I regret that but it is a frighteningly common reality: humiliation, physical injury, significant emotional damage. At the same time, it also illustrates a teaching and learning dynamic characterized by deliberate power imbalances, a frequent focus on competition and ranking, and a potentially widespread dismissal of students who do not conform to a specific athletic norm. Of course this is neither the whole nor only story, but it’s the one we are more likely to hear in the public sphere and that matters.
Physical Education as a field has come a very long way and the current mission statements, national standards and recent research, the emphasis on healthy social emotional development within and alongside physical development has become commonplace. Cooperative, team-building activities are firmly embedded in programs around the world. Wider ranges of movement options are being offered to students in the hopes of encouraging lifelong physical literacy and engagement.
The key here and in any conversation, really, is to make space for whatever ideas, perceptions, emotions we may be bringing to a topic first.
My students tend to do this automatically:
Me: Friends, we’re starting our soccer unit…
Them: “ Oh, I hate soccer!”
“Yay! Can we play a match?”
Add to that the various body language expressions of dread or exuberance. Their messages in such situations come in loud and clear.
That said, it’s important to understand that my students share a few fundamental priorities when they come to the gym. They have expectations and standards.
- They arrive looking for fun.
- They want to play with their friends.
- They want to challenge themselves and be challenged to varying degrees but in the right measure.
[Repeat each with appropriate image]
As their teacher, I of course have choices:
- I can focus on planning in ways which incorporate these priorities.
- Or not.
I have learned, often the hard way, what happens when I do not take student priorities into account:
They resist, they refuse, they avoid.
Examples of student resistance
Let me give you a couple of examples:
Several years ago when my training as a coaching professional was still fresh, a group of first graders were sitting on the gym floor watching me put down markers for our next activity. The longer I took, the louder they became. I stopped what I was doing and asked: You all just got very loud while I was setting up, what is it that you want me to understand?
They responded rapid fire: We want to have fun! This is boring! We want to play!
“So with your noise you’re telling me that I’m taking too long, I’m keeping you from having fun. I’m sorry. Let’s fix that!”
I remember the situation so clearly because it may have been the first time that I had ever asked students such a question and actually heard their response on a visceral level. I literally ‘stood corrected’ and we were able to proceed.
More recently among my youngest learners I was finding it hard to get them to participate in concert – meaning that they were all over the place. Herding cats syndrome. Also, my responses were not always helpful: frustration, exasperation, anger. So many individual cases of resistance and outright refusal.
I clearly needed to rethink my approach.
That’s how I landed on obstacle courses as a possible remedy. I created them for nearly every lesson. Obstacle courses satisfied several criteria:
- They are fun and exciting.
- Students can move through them autonomously for the most part
- It’s a recognizable pattern students can quickly make sense of
- They provide lots of practice of different movement skills
Watching students line up on their own without a struggle was the telltale sign that I was onto something.
In that same group I also made story time a fixture at the end of class. I read one or two picture books that I select from the library. Of all the things that I offer these learners in my PE class, nothing has been as reliably unifying and compelling as the read-aloud. I mean, who knew?
Accepting Resistance; Working Around and With It
What I’ve learned from students and experience is that resistance is part of the bargain we enter in education.
- Students resist things that they fear, dread or feel they cannot handle.
- Students resist not being regarded as individuals
- Students resist when their contextual priorities go unacknowledged.
Now, I’m going to repeat those statements, but replace “students” with “educators”
- Educators resist things that they fear, dread or feel they cannot handle.
- Educators resist not being regarded as individuals
- Educators resist when their contextual priorities go unacknowledged.
See what I did there? I’m talking about student resistance, yes and, I want us to also consider our own instances of resistance. There’s a connection. Just saying.
Please keep that in mind as we go.
But now, back to students.
Resistance (and refusal) are forms of power at our disposal. Children use resistance frequently in my classes. There are plenty of things they are asked to do which, in the words of Bartleby, the Scrivener, they would “prefer not to.”
Their resistance is both physical and metaphorical.
- When asked to make all gender groups, they drag their feet.
- When asked to create groups that are balanced in terms of skill and enthusiasm, they take their sweet time.
- When asked to replicate a skill as demonstrated, they reinvent the wheel.
- When asked to hustle up and get started, they dawdle …
We have on the one hand, the adult-teacher demand and expectation of certain responses and on the other hand, we have students demonstrating, well … if you really think about it:
Will, Autonomy, agency, creativity
And it drives us nuts? (ok, drives me nuts)
What I mean is, it rubs my ego the wrong way. What I mean is, I want to have things my way. I resist their resistance. There’s power and we struggle over who gets to hold it.
Let’s take a step back. I offer you this poem to illustrate.
What Is Going On?
Refusal in a world where choices are few Or not obvious To say no To rather not/ also to choose otherwise Where choice exists but is not advertised. What happens? I/we ask What is going on? There’s a confusion An assumption or series of assumptions Dictates Our response Which is an active interpretation of what we believe We’re seeing Measured against What we thought should be happening. Ah, a disconnect. We ask about/for understanding We are seeking clarity A way out of the confusion A way out of the cognitive mismatch. Again, What is going on? A way of asking Why Are you not doing what I expected In the way I expected? Why Don’t your actions correspond to the Picture in my head? Why, I am asking, Are you not reading my mind Correctly? Why Are we visibly at odds between My thinking and your doing? Why Is your aim to be more you And less me?
Let’s pause here. What do you notice? What do you wonder?
I penned this poem while asking myself what it is I really want to get across during our time together. I’m asking myself (and by extension, us) to take another look at the student behaviors we typically identify as resistance or refusal.
I often ask students: What is going on?
When I might do better by asking: What is it that you want/need me to understand?
And I would probably do well to ask: What else can I see in my students’ behaviors?
Towards an Irresistible Pedagogy
Thinking about and through all of these questions has helped me recognize what I’m trying to do in my classes. Some kind of resistance will always be there. What can I do to make this (lesson, class, experience) irresistible to students?
I use “irresistible” as aspirational rather than as fact.
Here’s what I’ve figured out so far:
- It is deeply relational and requires being our whole selves
- It is visibly responsive to student priorities
- It includes apologies where necessary
- It is inherently adaptive
Let’s talk about those in turn:
Relational –
I have to develop some kind of relationship with each of my students. It begins by learning their names and how to pronounce them correctly. I observe them carefully in order to notice their unique access points. This one loves cartwheels, while that one fears balls; another one tends to blurt out during instructions, while their classmate will hardly say “boo” in class. These details form the basis of our year together. At the same time, my students get to know me. That I’m kinda strict, I remember names and I can do a pretty good cartwheel.
Relational also means that I think about my students when choosing my attire for the day: fairy tale hoodie? Fruit shaped earrings? Broccoli or strawberry socks? These details matter. Changing my hairstyle or shoes can never go unnoticed. These can be great conversation starters or just reminders that I’m a person with particular tastes. These are more crumbs on the path of getting to know Mrs. Spelic.
Visibly responsive –
Along the same lines, I try to plan activities that will appeal to my students. I only make promises that I can keep. Although students will ask me every lesson if today is Awesome Gym Day, they know that it will happen and I’ll give them ample warning.
It also matters how the gym is set up, what’s written on the board, which equipment is in view? These provide clues that students parse like expert detectives. Reading the agenda on the board allows them to confirm their suspicions.
And of course they press me with further requests which I most likely cannot accommodate on the spot. I note their requests, however, and hold onto them for future lessons. And when I say no, I can cite a good reason.
Includes apologies
The most common injuries in my classes are hurt feelings. When students come to me to share a complaint about a classmate, I often ask if the other person already said sorry. The response is usually “no.”
Irresistible assumes that we’re going to make mistakes and fall short of our proclaimed goals.
It means that I model using apologies to start over and acknowledge doing the wrong thing. My students learn that we’re not in class in pursuit of perfection. No, we’re in class to build something useful and interesting with each other. To do that we have to be prepared to stop and unpack what went wrong. And we all practice listening, even when it may feel like the hardest thing to do.
Inherently adaptive
Of course, my students and I have to be prepared for changes during our time together. We may run out of time to do all the activities written on the board. Or discover that we’re missing the skill level to play a certain game. Also no two groups, even at the same grade level are ever the same. Above all, it has helped to let go of my expectations of stasis.
There are some things I can relatively easily identify as “irresistible” for the vast majority of students:
- First and foremost, Awesome Gym Day,
- But also the team building activity, Bridges.
- Choosing their own partners and groups
- Having music on in class
- Fun on their terms,
- Being heard, seeing their ideas put into practice
- When I wear my Lego earrings.
To capture the conundrum of sharing all this with you while also wondering if it even makes sense or holds value, I offer you another poem:
“What I mean by irresistible”
Look at me, look at this Me trying to tell you ‘bout something irresistible A pedagogy of all things! Pathways to learning, Means of instruction Irresistible, my foot! On the other hand, What you know about kids And movement and play? Given the chance, kids can make Nearly anything a game. What I’m saying, what I’ve learned is Just not to mess it up Irresistible respects desires Irresistible salutes the right challenge Irresistible knows how to kick it And have fun What I’m saying, what I’ve learned is We make awesome the standard; We are always aiming For satisfaction, this way, then that Sometimes we make it, sometimes not Make awesome the standard So we know what to do with choice When we have it know how to pursue our heart’s desire Even going solo We learn how to try and fail And try again Irresistible means I have to let go means I have to stop resisting means I have to acknowledge the wealth Of drive, creativity and self Running wild across the canvas Of our class Irresistible is about making options Visible, legible, real Irresistible is about discovering possibility In the tiniest thing Irresistible is about learning the truth That control is rarely a monopoly So, no, it’s not an answer Or a solution, please note. It’s an aperture to look through Once, then again A flight of fancy disguised as work A chance to see as if you hadn’t been looking All along
What might “irresistible” look, sound and feel like in your context?
Space for negotiation in our pedagogy?
Irresistible pedagogy has no interest in perfection or some (marketable) manufactured ideal; rather it’s about discovering the things, the conditions that keep us in the game; that keep us wanting to come back and practice a little more. Just enough of the right stuff and close watch on avoiding the worst stuff. From all sides.
Just enough of the right stuff – for our students, for ourselves, for and also from our institutions
A close watch on avoiding the worst stuff – especially in our institutions as well as in our practices.
Irresistible pedagogy tries to hold breathing space for change, adaptation, and sharing power.
As illustrations I want to share two very special valentines that I received from students last year and this year. The first from a 4th grader reads: “Dear Mrs. Spelic, thank you for sharing all the power with me!”
And the second, from a 5th grader: “Dear Ms. Spelic, You are a great PE teacher and make the best out of terrible situations.”
These both remind me of the work we, my students and I, are doing with and on each other. Reading each I feel seen, known and utterly understood. I mean, “make the best out of terrible situations…”
Troubling the waters before we go
Take 3 minutes to think about what we’ve talked about so far. How is it landing? What questions might you have?
One of the questions I have to ask is: Does my notion of an irresistible pedagogy assume a certain level of privilege? Given my particular context and relative positionality, how can it not? I am a veteran employee in a well resourced institution. I enjoy considerable professional autonomy and feel trusted to use my judgment in implementing our curriculum. I have the space and freedom to engage students in ways that highlight their agency and decision-making capabilities. And this approach is supported in my particular setting.
What if I were not party to these several advantages? Would I still be as open to sharing power and fostering student choice as much as now? I wonder and I cannot say.
Could it be that it is easier to share power when you feel you have some power to begin with?
As I’ve offered stories from my own experience and attempted to bundle them into a way of looking at my work, these questions about the role of privilege have needled me throughout. It’s no coincidence that the title includes “Hide and Seek”. However compelling the idea of an irresistible pedagogy may seem, we need to be clear about the conditions that support its pursuit and sustainability. What might an irresistible pedagogy hide or obscure? Who is at liberty to seek out or provide what could be deemed irresistible by students or teachers? What happens if hide and seek is not a game but a survival strategy? Does “irresistible” stand a chance?
What if hide and seek is what is required of you to keep your job or to protect and serve students? What good is an irresistible pedagogy then?
Never Done, Always Beginning What I’m learning, what I’m seeing is that Just one thing Is hardly a thing Because it cannot serve All of our needs today Or tomorrow Just one thing Is hardly a thing Because we need more tools For many tasks Both seen and unseen If I try to build something I hope my students will want It doesn’t mean that they Should never learn to struggle It doesn’t mean that they Should never learn to protest It doesn’t mean that their Wants won’t change shape or direction If I try to build something I hope my students will want It means I’m striving to Champion their independence It means I’m striving to Help them choose wisely It means I’m striving to Let go of my need to control the outcome If my students and I build something We find useful If my students and I build anything at all We must build imaginations If my students and I build A city of care A province of justice A nation of acceptance We are never done And always beginning.
The End
I’m going to stop here and encourage us to rest. I hope that I have sparked your imagination and offered some nourishing food for thought. The theme of the Otessa Conference is Critical Change. My students are living exemplars of critical change. They demand change with their needs out front. They use questions to investigate ideas. When they resist, avoid and refuse instruction, they usually have cause.
If my aim is to build something irresistible for my students, it is clear that I must also do that with my students. They are fierce, savvy and also caring negotiators.
If the notion of “irresistible pedagogy” seems far-fetched or unrealistic to you, I imagine that you have reasonable cause. Which is why it is key to interrogate what this concept might be hiding or obscuring? How might irresistible pedagogy be understood as less than inclusive or just?
I raise these questions at the end again as reminders that like our learners,
We are never done
And always beginning.
Thank you.
edifiedlistener 
I kind of can’t get over how incredible this is. It’s so powerful and gets to the heart of so much of the work we ALL need to do — including those of us who aren’t in education and who need to step up more to support those of you who are.