The central thesis of this chapter is that in order for effective learning to occur, teachers must facilitate learner engagement, and in order to do so, learning resistance has to be conceptually understood, acknowledged, identified, and addressed as a part of the curriculum for any given class, course, or program. This chapter provides a comprehensive overview of the literature on learning resistance, identifies three significant disjunctures between the theory and practice of curriculum development and instructional systems design, and analyzes the relationship between learning resistance and that theory-practice gap. The failure to see motivation and learning as an integrated whole, the mass production of curriculum, and the hesitance to teach something that cannot be measured are all discussed in detail, and suggestions are made for mitigating the negative effects of each.
Alexis de Tocqueville, that astute French observer of antebellum America, once wrote:There is a natural prejudice which prompts men to despise whomsoever has been their inferior long after he is become their equal; and the real inequality which is produced by fortune or by law is always succeeded by an imaginary inequality which is implanted in the manners of the people.For de Tocqueville then, the system of slavery (and segregation, though he did not live to see the latter) had two consequences: 1) a direct consequence, felt by slave and slaveowner (or segregated and segregationist) because of the system itself, i.e., "real" inequality, and 2) a secondary consequence, resulting from the behavior of their descendants after the system that enforced the real inequality had ended, i.e., "imaginary" inequality.Presciently, de Tocqueville predicted that in America the secondary effect would be long lasting, perhaps eternal. The prediction was based on his observations of other cultures where slavery once existed and where "the secondary consequence of slavery was limited.., for the freedman bore so entire a resemblance to those born free, that it soon became impossible to distinguish from amongst them." However, in America, he reasoned, "the abstract and transient fact of slavery is fatally united to the physical and permanent fact of color." And so there is a tragic equilibrium in which "the tradition of slavery dishonors the race, and the peculiarity of the race perpetuates the tradition of slavery."
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