Once compliance is internalised, resistance cannot be acknowledged as theoretical. If the system is presumed to be neutral, transparent, and fair, then refusal or misalignment must be explained elsewhere.
This post shows how genre-based pedagogy reclassifies resistance as a psychological issue — a matter of attitude, confidence, motivation, or mindset — rather than as a signal of limits within the theory or the pedagogy itself.
1. Resistance before psychologisation
In a genuinely semiotic pedagogy, resistance is interpretable.
A student who:
refuses a prescribed structure,
disrupts expected sequencing,
or produces an unclassifiable text
may be signalling an alternative construal of meaning or context. Resistance here is not obstruction; it is theoretical information.
2. Why systems cannot hear resistance
Once authority, assessment, and agency are proceduralised, resistance becomes unintelligible.
The system can only register:
compliance,
partial compliance,
or failure.
There is no category for principled refusal or alternative meaning-making. The theory has no place to put it.
3. The turn to the individual
When resistance cannot be theorised, it must be relocated.
Attention shifts from:
the structure of the task,
the limits of the genre model,
or the adequacy of the criteria,
to the student themselves.
Non-alignment is explained as:
lack of motivation,
poor confidence,
weak engagement,
or an unproductive mindset.
4. Support as correction
Psychologisation often appears as care.
Students are offered:
encouragement,
scaffolding,
reassurance,
or intervention.
But the goal of this support is not to reopen meaning-making. It is to restore alignment.
Resistance is treated as something to be fixed.
5. The foreclosure of critique
Once resistance is individualised, critique disappears.
Students cannot reasonably say:
the genre model does not capture what I am doing,
the stages distort my meanings,
the criteria misrecognise my text.
Such claims are reinterpreted as avoidance or insecurity.
6. The moralisation of success
Psychologisation also moralises outcomes.
Students who align successfully are understood as:
motivated,
resilient,
and growth-oriented.
Those who do not are framed as:
disengaged,
resistant to feedback,
or lacking confidence.
Structural effects are recoded as character traits.
7. Why this stabilises the system
By relocating resistance into psychology, the system protects itself.
The theory remains intact. The pedagogy remains unquestioned. Only the learner varies.
This makes reform unnecessary and dissent illegible.
8. Looking ahead
When resistance is psychologised, regulation can be distributed.
The final post traces how students are enlisted to monitor and correct one another — producing peer regulation and, ultimately, epistemic closure.
That is where we turn next.
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