"This text can serve as an invaluable tool to identify and overcome student resistance in the following ways. First, it encourages institutions to review their strategies to reduce student resistance in totality – for example, going beyond 'single-field explanations'. Everyone matters – leadership, faculty, staff, and students – and must collaborate such that the decisions on institutional learning systems and practices meet students’ needs and address their challenges. Second, it is replete with engaging examples (drawn from research and student voices), approaches, and instruments that give institutions fresh perspectives and practical resources to move forward in strengthening motivation and reducing resistance. Furthermore, by welcoming institutions to field-test IMSR, Tolman and Kremling provide an impetus for institutions to improve their current practices in addressing student resistance."
Reflective Teaching (Wabash Center)
“Truly a book for our time. Meticulously describing a theoretical framework of resistance, crafting an operational definition, and offering polyvocal narrative examples of resistance in action, this volume offers a model of resistance that is highly useful to researchers and university/college teachers alike.
This volume is written for university and college teachers and is meant to tie theory to practice. It is written clearly and persuasively with the purpose of encouraging the adoption of these practices for instructors across disciplines.
Overall, Why Students Resist Learning: A Practical Model for Understanding and Helping Students introduces a much-needed systems perspective for understanding student resistance in higher education. The editors and their authors understand and make visible the relational, contextual, and systemic contributors to resistance and offer invaluable tools to help educators examine and address resistance in their own settings.”
Teachers College Record
"This book takes the challenge head on. It directly addresses the great and central problem: student resistance to active learning. And it addresses that problem in the right way [which] is to recognize that student resistance is a systemic problem: students do what they do for…reasons [that] are many and varied. But student resistance is not magic. If we can understand the reasons for their behavior, we can change it. That is the central project of this book: to understand why and how students resist taking a deep approach to learning, so that we can take a deeper approach to designing a curriculum and a pedagogy that can help them to grow, rather than let them shrink into their protective cocoon of resistance.
This is not the first book to address student resistance. However, as far as I can tell, it is the first book to address the phenomenon systematically and in a way that brings together a variety of perspectives and disciplines that can help to explain it…[and] that integrates what we know about psychology, pedagogy, and learning science to construct a framework for recognizing, diagnosing, and addressing such resistance. Of course, every student is an individual. But they are individuals whose behavior can tell us much if we will seek for the patterns and pull in from disparate disciplines the wisdom that bears on their choices and motivations. Tolman and Kremling tell the stories to find the patterns, and give us an apparatus for solving the problems rather than just blaming the students.
In this book, the teachers become learners, the learners become teachers, and thus they make visible to all of us what goes wrong, and how it can go right, in teaching and learning. If you are a teacher, or care about what teachers do, you have much to learn.”
John Tagg, Associate Professor of English, Palomar College
and co-author with Robert B. Barr of the seminal article "From Teaching to Learning”
