[{"data":1,"prerenderedAt":-1},["ShallowReactive",2],{"detail-sidebar-cat-0-en-105":3,"doc-seo-597855-105":59,"doc-detail-597855-en":130},{"code":4,"msg":5,"data":6},0,"success",[7,13,18,23,28,33,38,43,48,51,55],{"id":8,"doc_module":4,"doc_module_name":9,"category_name":10,"show_sort_weight":11,"slug":12},1,"Document","Story & Novel",90,"story-novel",{"id":14,"doc_module":4,"doc_module_name":9,"category_name":15,"show_sort_weight":16,"slug":17},2,"Literature",80,"literature",{"id":19,"doc_module":4,"doc_module_name":9,"category_name":20,"show_sort_weight":21,"slug":22},4,"Exam",70,"exam",{"id":24,"doc_module":4,"doc_module_name":9,"category_name":25,"show_sort_weight":26,"slug":27},5,"Comic",60,"comic",{"id":29,"doc_module":4,"doc_module_name":9,"category_name":30,"show_sort_weight":31,"slug":32},6,"Technology",50,"technology",{"id":34,"doc_module":4,"doc_module_name":9,"category_name":35,"show_sort_weight":36,"slug":37},7,"Healthcare",40,"healthcare",{"id":39,"doc_module":4,"doc_module_name":9,"category_name":40,"show_sort_weight":41,"slug":42},8,"Research & Report",30,"research-report",{"id":44,"doc_module":4,"doc_module_name":9,"category_name":45,"show_sort_weight":46,"slug":47},9,"Religion & Spirituality",20,"religion-spirituality",{"id":46,"doc_module":4,"doc_module_name":9,"category_name":49,"show_sort_weight":46,"slug":50},"World Cup","world-cup",{"id":52,"doc_module":4,"doc_module_name":9,"category_name":53,"show_sort_weight":52,"slug":54},10,"Lifestyle","lifestyle",{"id":56,"doc_module":4,"doc_module_name":9,"category_name":57,"show_sort_weight":24,"slug":58},19,"General","general",{"code":4,"msg":60,"data":61},"ok",{"site_id":62,"language":63,"slug":64,"title":65,"keywords":66,"description":67,"schema_data":68,"social_meta":123,"head_meta":125,"extra_data":127,"updated_unix":129},105,"en","i-cant-relate-refusing-identification-demands-in-teaching-and-learning","“I Can’t Relate”: Refusing Identification Demands in Teaching and Learning","","The document examines how identification demands in teaching and learning shape student experience and expectations. It analyzes anonymous mid-semester evaluations from a course titled “Queer Critique,” where students express difficulty participating and feeling they do not belong or relate to the material. The argument challenges the “relatability imperative” passed through literature and composition pedagogy, situating it within broader neoliberal cultural logic. It reviews critiques of immersive identification, referencing theorists and linking the normativity of identifying with aesthetic and psychological needs.",{"@graph":69,"@context":122},[70,84,105],{"@type":71,"itemListElement":72},"BreadcrumbList",[73,77,79,82],{"item":74,"name":75,"@type":76,"position":8},"https://docshare.wps.com","Home","ListItem",{"item":78,"name":9,"@type":76,"position":14},"https://docshare.wps.com/document/",{"item":80,"name":15,"@type":76,"position":81},"https://docshare.wps.com/document/literature/",3,{"item":83,"name":65,"@type":76,"position":19},"https://docshare.wps.com/document/i-cant-relate-refusing-identification-demands-in-teaching-and-learning/597855/",{"url":83,"name":65,"@type":85,"image":86,"author":91,"headline":65,"publisher":94,"fileFormat":97,"inLanguage":63,"description":67,"dateModified":98,"datePublished":99,"encodingFormat":97,"isAccessibleForFree":100,"interactionStatistic":101},"DigitalDocument",{"url":87,"@type":88,"width":89,"height":90},"https://docshare.wps.com/thumbnails/i-cant-relate-refusing-identification-demands-in-teaching-and-learning/597855.png","ImageObject",300,407,{"name":92,"@type":93},"SANS","Person",{"url":74,"name":95,"@type":96},"DocShare","Organization","application/pdf","2026-10-21","2026-10-15",true,{"@type":102,"interactionType":103,"userInteractionCount":8},"InteractionCounter",{"@type":104},"ViewAction",{"@type":106,"mainEntity":107},"FAQPage",[108,114,118],{"name":109,"@type":110,"acceptedAnswer":111},"What issue do students raise about the course “Queer Critique”?","Question",{"text":112,"@type":113},"Students report they cannot participate because they feel they lack relevant knowledge, struggle to connect readings to their own lives, and feel they do not belong in the world presented.","Answer",{"name":115,"@type":110,"acceptedAnswer":116},"How does the document frame the “relatability imperative”?",{"text":117,"@type":113},"It treats the demand that readers identify with texts, characters, and experiences as a received wisdom in pedagogy and scholarship, one that is rarely questioned even though it can exclude or pressure students.",{"name":119,"@type":110,"acceptedAnswer":120},"Why does the document challenge identification as an educational goal?",{"text":121,"@type":113},"It argues that identification demands are logically and psychologically loaded, and that immersive identification can undermine critical distance expected from serious criticism or scholarship.","https://schema.org",{"og:url":83,"og:type":124,"og:title":65,"og:site_name":95,"og:description":67},"article",{"robots":126,"canonical":83},"index,follow",{"doc_id":128,"site_id":62},597855,1792590107,{"code":4,"msg":5,"data":131},{"doc_id":128,"user_id":132,"nickname":92,"user_avatar":133,"doc_module":4,"category_id":14,"category_name":15,"doc_title":65,"doc_description":67,"doc_content":134,"file_id":135,"file_url":136,"file_type":137,"file_size":138,"view_count":8,"is_deleted":4,"is_public":8,"is_downloadable":8,"audit_status":8,"page_count":139,"language":140,"language_code":63,"site_id":62,"html_lang":63,"table_of_contents":141,"faqs":142,"seo_title":143,"seo_description":67,"update_tm":144,"read_time":145},962090760505,"https://ap-avatar.wpscdn.com/davatar_155a257f0dc6eb9ab79c44ca47cae57d","“I Can’t Relate”: Refusing Identification Demands in Teaching and Learning  \nIan Barnard  \nChapman University  \nEither you are with us or you are with the terrorists.  \nGeorge W. Bush, 2001  \nReading is the sole means by which we slip, involuntarily, often helplessly, into another’s skin, another’s voice, another’s soul.  \nJoyce Carol Oates  \nIdentification, that’s how it starts. And ends with being rounded up, experimented on and eliminated.  \nErik Lehnsherr inX-Men: First Class, qtd. by Nelson 81  \nA sampling of anonymous student mid-semester evaluations ofa recent course I taught entitled“Queer Critique” represent a particular strain of student dispositions toward the course:  \n􀁸 \"I feel like I can't participate because I don't know anything about stuff like this.\"  \n􀁸 \"This class definitely gives people a broader understanding of a different world, but I don't think I really belong in that world. I don't feel as if I fit in with the people here and it's kind of hard to make connections to the reading because I don't see it pertaining to mevery much. \"  \n􀁸 \"because I am heterosexual and don't have an interest in the same sex, and have never experienced that lifestyle I feel a little outnumbered.\"  \nHowever, my goal in this article is not to excoriate students for a lack of empathy or failure of imagination in their apparent inability to sufficiently “relate” to diverse texts, experiences, and human subjects, but rather to question the received wisdom of the relatability imperative that has been passed down to us from colleagues, scholars in literature and composition pedagogy, education theorists, psychologists, child development specialists, and others—students can hardly be blamed for having internalized these imperatives so well.  \nThese assumptions about identification and whose duty it is to facilitate it are of course embedded in the larger context of neoliberal capitalist democracy and the cultural productions that encapsulate and disseminate its lures, demands, and interdictions. The Los Angeles Weekly’sunhappy review of the 2013 horror film Haunt succinctly traces the lay incarnation of this relatability commonplace in popular culture: the critic complains,“The frustration here comes from the filmmakers’ inability to present characters with dimension, so that we might come to identify with them and their fears”(Wigon 43-44) . Identification, it seems, is the prerequisite for  \nsympathy, engagement, and pleasure (even if that pleasure is tinctured by fear), and its achievement is an irreducible mark of aesthetic (and other) accomplishment. The academic tradition of this relatability imperative has particularly strong roots in humanities pedagogy, especially in the diverse histories of various tropes of reader identification in English studies. Blakey Vermeule, Wayne Booth, and others remind us that in the academic study of literature, there has long been an admonition against an overly immersive identification with the text that precludes the critical distance that is supposed to be the mark of a serious critic or scholar (Vermeule x, 16, 248; Booth 352-54) .1 But as Teresa de Lauretis points out, identification demands continue to be made of readers of fiction texts ofall kinds (as evidenced by the unexceptionality of the Haunt review):  \nThe ability of language and images to refer to the phenomenal world is still operative in works of fiction, however compromised or even residual: of course we know that it’s only a story, it’s only a movie, but just the same . . . The unnegotiable demands of most readers, viewers, or listeners to identify and to identify with—to make sense of what’s happening, to know who’s who in the diegesis, to find some incitement to fantasy or some versions of oneself in the mirror of the text, be it only the ego’s sense of mastery over the object-text—are the normative requirements with which fiction is expected to comply. (244)  \nHere de Lauretis captures the logical absurdity of readers’ d","cbCaifkuLJmvU7GS","https://ap.wps.com/l/cbCaifkuLJmvU7GS","pdf",432479,27,"English","# Introduction\n# Student Responses and the Relatability Imperative\n## Identification as Prerequisite for Engagement\n## Critique of Immersive Identification\n# Theoretical Framework and Normative Demands","[{\"question\":\"What issue do students raise about the course “Queer Critique”?\",\"answer\":\"Students report they cannot participate because they feel they lack relevant knowledge, struggle to connect readings to their own lives, and feel they do not belong in the world presented.\"},{\"question\":\"How does the document frame the “relatability imperative”?\",\"answer\":\"It treats the demand that readers identify with texts, characters, and experiences as a received wisdom in pedagogy and scholarship, one that is rarely questioned even though it can exclude or pressure students.\"},{\"question\":\"Why does the document challenge identification as an educational goal?\",\"answer\":\"It argues that identification demands are logically and psychologically loaded, and that immersive identification can undermine critical distance expected from serious criticism or scholarship.\"}]","“I Can’t Relate”: Refusing Identification Demands in Teaching and Learning | PDF",1792085837,42]