Confronting Resistance: Sonny’s Blues – and Mine

Today, as an overview of the midterm to my developmental English class, I explained to the class that the format will be a summary and response to an essay.  One of my students anxiously raised her hand to ask a question. She asked, “Can you tell us what the article will be about?” I said, I know what the article is about, but I cannot share that information beforehand.  She disappointingly replied, “I hope it is a good essay, because I will not read a boring essay!” I advised her to spark an interest when the text that is unfamiliar or “boring” – To activate her prior knowledge and connect that knowledge to the new text. That is much easier said than done!

I couldn’t help to reflect on what Arliene Wilner pointed out in Confronting Resistance: Sonny’s Blues – and Mind, “…students naturally rely on habitual patterns of reaction, often shaped by unexamined emotions that encourage them to convert nuanced, complex relationships (among characters or ideas) into simplistic, distorted ones. In extreme cases, as in the rebellion in my class, students may simply refuse to do the reading if they do not like what it is “about.” (Page 2) Clearly, this student has not yet learned how to cope with an interpretive assignment.  In the past five weeks of this semester, students have read several essays and completed a triple-entry journal for these essays. Based on her responses, I have noticed that she is an underprepared student who has a difficult time making meaning of text. Is it that she doesn’t have the comprehension strategies to derive meaning out of text or is it an emotional factor? According to the article, “…emotional factors, usually tied to values, are implicated in one’ resistance to new ideas, which are then either rejected or transformed into a more comfortable version that can be assimilated to one’s existing ethos.” (Page 2) My student’s rejection of the “boring” text also has to do with engagement. If she is not emotionally connected to the text, then she might not be engaged as the article points out, “…a reader’s primary emotional connection with a text should not be underestimated, as it easily can be in an academic setting…students must be ‘taken in’ by a text – engaged by it on the level of story – before they can achieve fruitful critical distance from it.” (Page 4)

One of the barriers to critical thinking is our own personal judgment and belief system.  Students engage in critical thinking with a response and interpretation assignment. If the text is viewed by the students as sacred, they might not open up their minds, by letting go of their own strict personal beliefs, to engage in a meaningful manner with the text in order to draw meaning from the text.   In the case of my student, she might be resistant to new text if her own personal values do not align with the author’s views or the subject matter.  If she perceives texts as sacred, she will not be open to manipulate the text, analyze the information, and open her own mind to new information. “…we cannot transfer our appreciation of a work of art to anyone, especially not to student who feel so threatened by the subject matter that they cannot enter the author’s imagined world or who automatically assimilate apparently familiar elements to a stock story line, a reduced, distorted shadow of the text that fails to account for the richness and subtlety…’Sonny Blues’ moves toward an emotional climax, but it is a climax that student will not reach if they remain safely outside the text, resisting assimilation into its disturbing world.” (Page 13)  In order for students to meaningfully engage in a text, they need to be emotionally connected with the text. They need to let go of their strongly held moral judgments and deep-dive into the text!