Make Me!: Understanding and Engaging Student Resistance in School (Youth Development and Education Series)

"Make Me! deserves strong consideration by all parties concerned about the education of students from diverse communities...The compelling and thickly descriptive vignettes, coupled with poignant and skillfully related research and practical applications provide future and practicing educators with a strong case for viewing students' resistance as an opportunity to develop more conscientious and equity oriented classrooms." --Matthew J. Moulton, Educational Studies "Make Me! challenges our views of student resistance and forces us to examine our responses toward it while promising that both teachers and students will be better off for the effort. As educators, we come away knowing that our mission is to change the culture of the school and the classroom, not to attempt to change the student." --Stacie DeFreitas, Teachers College Record "This text offers a thorough examination of issues related to students demonstrating challenging behaviors and resistance in today's school system... Educators, administrators, and ancillary personnel will find this text extremely insightful and, after reading it, will perhaps begin a reexamination of current professional dispositions and practices in working with students from diverse backgrounds." --G. Moreno, Choice October 2015

In this groundbreaking book, Eric Toshalis explores student resistance through a variety of perspectives, arguing that oppositional behaviors can be not only instructive butproductive. All too often treated as a matter of compliance, student resistance can also be understood as a form of engagement, as young people confront and negotiate newidentities in the classroom environment. The focus of teachers' efforts, Toshalis says, should not be about "managing" adolescents but about learning how to read their behavior and respond to it in developmentally productive, culturally responsive, and democratically enriching ways. Noting that the research literature is scattered across fields, Toshalis draws on four domains of inquiry: theoretical, psychological, political, and pedagogical. The result is a resource that can help teachers address this pervasive classroom challenge in ways that enhance student agency, motivation, engagement, and academic achievement. The coauthor of Understanding Youth: Adolescent Development for Educators (Harvard Education Press, 2006), Toshalis blends accessible explanations of theory and research with vignettes of interactions among educators and students. In Make Me!, Toshalis helps teachers perceive possibility, rather than pathology, in student resistance.