When I ponder what it means for students and teachers to be adversarial, my mind immediately jumps to the topic of curriculum. Students and teachers can debate all day long over what topics, subjects, texts, etc, should and can be included in a course curriculum, but it is ultimately up to the professor to decide what the class will learn. The professor chooses the canon and in doing so chooses what the mass of students will learn in the course; this is a big responsibility and task. What allows the professor to make this decision? Is it ethical or fair for students to be told what they will learn in a course?  

In Jay Dolmage’s article Academic Abelism: Disability and Higher Education, he defines neoliberalism as: “The redefinition of intellectual values that highlight the need of the individual student (or worker) to become a more flexible (and thus fungible or disposable) producer and consumer” (1). This push for multimodal learning has greatly expanded within recent years, and I myself believe in multimodal and dialogical pedagogy. But I never stopped to consider the effects that multimodal learning might have on a differently-abled student. I failed to consider that multimodal learning might be challenging for many students, or that traditional learning methods such as lectures might actually be more helpful than hurtful. I, as the instructor for English 101, made these choices to incorporate multimodal learning and game-based learning without thinking that these styles of teaching might be unfavorable for some students. And although this hasn’t been the case for the majority of my students (purely based on my individual conferences with them when they claimed that they enjoy the class curriculum thus far), it’s still important to consider when lesson planning.  

This notion leads me to the bigger question of: how can I as the single professor of a course decide which lessons or curriculum should be taught? Should the class get some say in what they are paying to learn? As a student, my inclination to this question is yes! Students should have a say in what they learned. But as a professor, it seems irresponsible(?) to allow the students to choose what they want to study… I believe this is the great conflict between teachers and students, and an inherently negative one at that.  

This is an especially difficult adversary to approach when you consider the many different learners that one classroom can hold. If one class of 24 students contains Super Samanthas, Slow Samanthas, and Somnolent Samanthas, how can/should one professor create a class curriculum that is engaging and informative for all? Should all three types of Samanthas share their input, and if they do, how can the instructor reconcile these 3 different learning preferences? Because of these different learners (none of them being worse than the other) the literary canon and course curriculum will continue to be an adversarial topic between teachers and students.