I haven’t had many (or any?) adversarial interactions with students here or in other contexts (at least as far as I can tell) so it’s a little hard to define from the perspective of being the instructor. I guess a connotation of adversary is more or less competitor, so if I took that as a watered down version of adversary there are times when I feel as if I’m in an adversarial relationship with my students. There are certain instances where we’re competing for time or for the ability to speak. However, this manifests itself in pretty innocuous ways. For example, yesterday, at the end of class, we had a few minutes left, but somehow I had signaled that the class was over, I guess by beginning to talk about the homework. My students, at this signal, started putting their stuff away, zipping up their backpacks and talking to one another. This happens at the end of pretty much every class, but yesterday there was a little extra volume, a little extra talking. So, I just did the classic move of pause-what-you’re-saying-and-look-expectantly-out-at-the-audience and my students noticed the change and focused enough for me to finish announcing their homework details. This is about as adversarial as it gets in my classroom.

I do remember some of my high school teachers who seemed to perceive us, the students, as adversaries. I have a distinct memory of a sub who came in to a physics class and immediately gave us the impression that he didn’t trust us and that he had to show us that he was the true boss and authority figure. He interrupted us, asked us questions in an aggressive tone, and just generally gave off a super weird energy. I remember he mimicked the words of one of my classmates in front of us all. In these early moments, rather than whipping us into shape or something, he lost the class and illustrated the extent of his insecurity over his position. I remember a sort of collective who the hell does this dude think he is? moment. As high-schoolers we were not only trained to identify other people’s insecurities but we were also used to feeling our way through the nuances of complex power struggles. This sub felt like he was painting a caricature of us as students, as some sort of Animal House-esque frat, which implied he was the ridiculous and struggling dean (I’m not sure if this is how Animal House goes down I haven’t ever seen it). In any case it felt like a huge load of bullshit and we responded by throwing a load of bullshit back at him. Reading Dolmage’s account of Jon Westling’s imaginary student, who he describes as gaming the system to the furthest extreme, feels like a parallel to this more micro version of distrust that the sub communicated to us.

I think these sorts of power struggles are the type of adversarial relationships that are inherently negative. Moments where the authority figure displays their distrust of the students, while accidentally proclaiming how shaky their authority really is. I’m not sure what a healthy adversarial relationship would look like. Competition seems like it can be positive in certain contexts. Maybe the inherently negative piece of adversarial relationships (as I understand them) is the necessary squashing of one person by the other. Competition feels like it could entail both folks lifting each other up (at the risk of sounding like an apologist for capitalism), whereas adversaries seem to wish for the others extinction. I certainly don’t want this! I can’t really see a way to a good adversarial relationship, but maybe I’m just not understanding the question.