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Authors analyze student resistance and classroom atmosphere using participant-observation, class notes, interviews, essay analyses, and end-of-semester evaluations, focusing on how politicized readings shaped uncertainty and critical engagement across first-year writing 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was the main purpose of the “Cinderella” assignment?","Question",{"text":62,"@type":63},"Students compared different “Cinderella” versions and analyzed how the story’s meanings, including intended morals, shift across versions, especially in relation to gender and class tensions.","Answer",{"name":65,"@type":60,"acceptedAnswer":66},"How did the authors study student reactions to the assignment?",{"text":67,"@type":63},"Bill used participant-observation, gathering notes from class sessions, conducting interviews, analyzing student essays, and reviewing end-of-semester student evaluations.",{"name":69,"@type":60,"acceptedAnswer":70},"Why did the assignment generate more resistance than expected?",{"text":71,"@type":63},"The authors expected a familiar, low-risk comparison task, but students related comfortably to fairy tales while feeling increasingly uncomfortable with the university and its discourse, making the disruption of an “icon” of student life provoke 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Carse  \n_______________________  \nWe actually thought it was going to be easy. With Wendy teaching the class and Bill taking an active participantobserver role in it, we thought students would respond to the relatively low-risk venture of comparing different versions of the “Cinderella” fairy tale and analyzing the story's possible role in acculturating children. Wendy had used a similar assignment previously and felt the students had been able to relax and have some fun exploring the ways in which the changes from version to version influenced not only the intended moral but the meanings that could be read into it. We both believed the readings were less difficult than the ones accompanying the assignments that had preceded the “Cinderella” segment of the class: Stanley Milgram's “The Perils of Obedience” and a series of articles that focused on the decline of America and the role of women in the country. Surely, this assignment would have to be perceived as a break.  \nBut we had not counted on something important: the relatively comfortable relationships students had with fairytales as contrasted to the increasingly uncomfortable relationship they were experiencing with the university and its discourse. Not only would we be turning the fairy tale on its head to reveal how it mediates gender and class tensions, but we would be disrupting yet another icon of the students' lives, so many of which had already been challenged through their courses in history and science. On top of that, we would be doing it in a first-year writing course, a class in which their peers in other sections seemed to be held less accountable for the type of critical thinking being demanded here. Yes, we thought the assignment could be both fun and challenging. We believed that by using something familiar to the students, a certain comfort zone could be reached. They then could experience the sensation of criticizing an object they were deeply invested in, thus exposing to scrutiny the contradictions abounding in our postmodern world (see Sells' 1995 critique of The Little Mermaid for an example of the tensions that can surface when examining a fairy tale) . We ended up engaged in more resistance than we had encountered in any of the other assignments for the course.  \nIn constructing this research project, Bill was looking to uncover student reaction to English courses in which the professor carried through with a political agenda. While practitioners over the past fifteen years have reported favorably on their own classrooms or programs (see, for example, Bauer, 1990; Berlin, 1991; George and Shoos, 1992; Shor 1996; Thelin, 2000; Beech, 2004), notable recent studies (Durst 1999; Seitz 2004) have suggested that instructors have not taken their students' needs into account in devising pedagogies that include politicized material. Through the participant-observation method, Bill hoped to glean information that would not contain the bias of the instructor but avoid the detachment present in an outside observer. He approached Wendy and explained that he was looking to study a teacher who used political readings to create uncertainty in student convictions. He wanted to see how this uncertainty manifested itself in student texts and classroom decorum. Wendy's pedagogy contained many political elements, as one of her goals was to try to disrupt complacency in her students through her writing assignments. She agreed to allow Bill to conduct a semester long participant-observation in one section of her writing course.  \nOur conclusions on the issue of resistance to the “Cinderella” assignment are derived mostly from Bill's data, including notes from all the class sessions, interviews with the students, analyses of their essays, and end-ofsemester student evaluations. In coming to our conclusions, we focused on the atmosphere of the classroom d","cbCaijLwBR8kkNMw","https://ap.wps.com/l/cbCaijLwBR8kkNMw","pdf",53626,12,"English","# Disrupting Fairy Tales and Unsettling Students\n## Classroom setup and unexpected resistance\n## Research design and data sources\n## Context of the course and Assignment #4\n## Preceding assignments and class tone","[{\"question\":\"What was the main purpose of the “Cinderella” assignment?\",\"answer\":\"Students compared different “Cinderella” versions and analyzed how the story’s meanings, including intended morals, shift across versions, especially in relation to gender and class tensions.\"},{\"question\":\"How did the authors study student reactions to the assignment?\",\"answer\":\"Bill used participant-observation, gathering notes from class sessions, conducting interviews, analyzing student essays, and reviewing end-of-semester student evaluations.\"},{\"question\":\"Why did the assignment generate more resistance than expected?\",\"answer\":\"The authors expected a familiar, low-risk comparison task, but students related comfortably to fairy tales while feeling increasingly uncomfortable with the university and its discourse, making the disruption of an “icon” of student life provoke resistance.\"}]","The CEA Forum - Winter/Spring 2007 - Disrupting Fairy Tales and Unsettling Students | PDF",1792085727,18]