A Final Report by Lukey Lu

Imagine you are an undergraduate student now approaching the end of the semester in the University of Toronto. You just finished some term tests and survived through some assignments. You thought you are doing fine — everything is under the control. However, the reality soon slaps your face: you get an almost failing grade on the test you studied the whole night for, but your friends all did a good job. While adjusting your own emotion, you also have to deal with other essays due soon and start to review for the approaching final exams to game-change your academic performance for that course.

Desperations. Self-doubt. Peer pressures…all these added on to you at once and become suffocating. Anxiously, you want to save yourself out of such situation. In your email, you find that colorful weekly newsletter from Student Life department that is automatically subscribed by all UofT students with the title: Exam ready. Again, anxiously, you click into it.

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You are then led to the Centre for Learning Strategy Support (CLSS)’s website under the Student Life department. Student Life’s website is one of the most colorful websites at UofT. While having the UofT dark blue as the key color, a palette-like background is applied on the landing page to connote the diversity and colorfulness of university ‘life’ — the central focus of the Student Life department. The Centre for Learning Strategy Support (CLSS) is a sub-division under Student Life services, which, as the name explicitly illustrates, provides services and support for students’ academic life at the university.

Clicking into CLSS’s webpage, the first thing that attracts you is perhaps the concept of ‘learning’ — it is literally written everywhere — ‘learning goals’, ‘learning supports’, ‘study strategies’, ‘learning how to learn’… Scrolling down, your eyes then immediately become distracted by the enormous clickable links – appearing as embedded forms in blue texts with underlines. You click into some for exploration and open the tab named ‘study strategies’. You then see a menu with a detailed list, again, in blue (meaning they have links embedded in every item) of diverse skills carefully divided into different categories (e.g., tips for exams, managing exam stress, improving your academic skills). Recalling your academic struggles and ‘symptoms’, you tightly and firmly hold the control button on your keyboard and click: ‘motivation and procrastination’, ‘exam study tips’, ‘writing effectively’, and other links like ‘time management’, ‘managing projects’ — all these labels. You want improvement, urgently, towards your academic skill-set and to game-change your performance. Inside these links, you find even more clickable links about other related services — e.g., diverse workshops, activities, and learning strategist appointments. You further click, click, click, and click…

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Browser slowdown and freeze for a second. Breathe. Coming to your senses. Unattentively, the browser tab bar becomes a cluttered mess of tiny tabs. When you realize it, there are already more than 10 tabs opened in your browser.

Neoliberal education: what is that?

In fact, the above is exactly my first experience of browsing CLSS’s webpage. Just for exploration, I eventually opened too many tabs and got lost in the website. Nevertheless, this does remind me of some similar online experiences — online shopping.

In both experiences, users get constantly distracted by unplanned or unexpected items on every webpage they open. These items become seductive and further tempt them to take instant actions: click in and take it! On an online shopping website, what users usually become attracted to are the advertisements. From an Althusserian view, interpellation happens the moment users click into the unplanned items (Althusser 2002): what lies behind their impulsive click is a hidden form of identity transformation – users hailed by the capitalist ideology and transformed into market-desired subjectivity – consumers. This logic is similar on the CLSS website. The enormous array of academic skill links functions the same as advertisements, calling individuals to take action. Once students click in, they also successfully become interpellated into the regime’s desired form of learner. Their desire to improve themselves then also gets ignited and, impulsively, constructs them into the path of self-improvement.

In neoliberal discourse, this is exactly the process of self-entrepreneuring. In his work Psychopolitics: Neoliberalism and New Technologies of Power, Han views such phenomena as a new form of subjugation (Han 2017). For him, individuals in this era are no longer subjugated as subjects but as projects (Han 2017, 1). Everyone becomes their own long-term project that they, individually, should be responsible for. Thus, the new normalized practice in this regime becomes: we should work on ourselves through constant and endless engineering, improving, and reinventing (Han 2017, 1). We then, in Hegelian terms, are both Master and Slave at once — in capitalist vocabulary, the enterprise and labor at the same time (Han 2017, 5). Under the neoliberal regime, we are transformed into entrepreneurs — who are demanded to constantly work on our own project: ourselves (Han 2017, 5). In other words, every form of improvement towards ourselves is a form of self-entrepreneurship. This is the naturalized characteristic in this neoliberal regime, alongside highly economized marketing values and logic (e.g., productivity and efficiency) (Han 2017, 10).

Thus, the promotion of such values on CLSS’s website is a powerful indicator of the education system we are in – the neoliberal education system. This education system is a product of the neoliberal political economy regime and inherits all the characteristics of neoliberalism: self-entrepreneurship, individualism, and all forms of capitalist and marketing logic (productivity and efficiency). In other words, the idealized ‘successful student’ under such an education system is one who can engineer themself to gain and intake all these values — namely, becoming a well-disciplined neoliberal subject.

Nevertheless, there is a ‘gap’ left out. The neoliberal education system constructs such an idealized student and pushes the entire higher education system to reconstruct itself around those values (Shear 2015, 2). Yet it does not provide anyone with clues about how to become ‘successful’. It leaves individuals to find such a path by themselves, which, ironically, is part of the individualism promoted by neoliberal values. Thus, to fill in such a gap and help students achieve success, different forms of services start to emerge within the university system. CLSS is a perfect example of this, intending to help students succeed academically.

What appears in front of us, in Student Life, is a higher education service sector seemingly designed to push students into the neoliberal education system and interpellate individuals to become the ‘perfect learner’. This system initially appears to me as the sector that stands on the same side as the institutional apparatus: it aims to transform students through comprehensive guidance, regulation, and discipline into homogenous neoliberal subjects that can bring ‘success’ (generate benefits) for the institution. It transforms students into means. It suffocates them into this toxic system that ignores their subjectivity. However, paradoxically, CLSS staffs are mostly highly educated subjects with backgrounds from this institution; they should experience and know the system better than anyone else.

However, such a paradox gets resolved and shifts into a ‘how’ question after I know individual staff members and their attitudes towards the environment. They are mainly frustrated and disappointed towards the ‘university’ or the neoliberal education system. Thus, this paper is not simply offering a critical lens towards the current neoliberal education system. Through narrating individual staff members’ (CLSS’s learning strategists) counter-hegemonic practices within the constraints, this paper explores how staff navigate all these paradoxes and contradictions in their position and workspace.

The following sections of the paper will suggest their counter-hegemonic way of navigating the contradictions through the strategic use of the ‘gap’ in neoliberal education. Since neoliberal education does not regulate the way to become ‘successful’, this becomes a chance for Learning Strategists to ‘sneak’ their resistance forces into the regime: 1) suggesting collaboration with students rather than ‘leading’ students, 2) providing alternative ways of thinking to students, and 3) affectively passing down the ‘help’ and leading students to iterate the practice.

Through demonstrating these counter-hegemonic stories, this paper, from a Foucauldian perspective, also suggests that individuals do not freely consent to becoming docile (Foucault 1975[1984]). Docile bodies are those that are ready to be disciplined and subjugated to power (Foucault 1975[1984]). There is a hidden sense of ‘willingness’ embedded that makes such ‘paradoxical subjectification’ seem to be based on the individual’s free will – no one is physically forcing them to submit (Foucault 1975[1984]). However, there are always social structural forces discursively acting beyond individuals’ awareness, leading them to take certain actions and undergo certain subjugations. Following this vein, this paper attempts to denaturalize the individual’s ‘docile body’ – no one is naturally ‘willing’ to be disciplined and assimilated. There are always external forces, unconsciously, constructing such a will to be ‘docile’.

Broadly speaking, we, in this era, are always navigating inside the contradictions: we are critique neoliberalism, but we are ultimately neoliberal subjects. Thus, my examination of these counter-hegemonic stories also intends to reveal individuals’ lived experiences in the system. These individuals are special: they are the individuals ‘stuck’ in the middle. They are student-facing staff in the university, but they are neither students anymore, nor staff completely submitted to the neoliberal educational hegemony. They, as intellectuals, are always aware of the environment, frustrated by the system, but have to ‘cope’ with it and help students navigate through it. Thus, through investigating how staff navigate through the contradiction, this article invites everyone to reflect on ourselves: as neoliberal subjects, how should we live inside the paradox?

Guidance or collaboration: ‘let’s have a conversation!’

“We are all learning together (with the students) — I think that’s always the way that learning strategist approach students! It’s NEVER from a…a place of I know the way better. It is from a place of…you know, ‘let’s have a CONVERSATION’, where both of us are going to work towards a plan that is going to refine your learning.”

Alice, a learning strategist in the CLSS department, excitedly shared this view with me during the interview after one online staff-facing workshop. I asked about her view towards the learning strategist’s role in guiding students. In her response, one thing that caught my attention deeply was the word ‘conversation’ — she used this to describe the appointment with students. She is a fast speaker with an energetic speaking tone. However, she spoke this word ‘conversation’ in a slowed-down speed and clearly pronounced every syllable in it.  Indeed, her emphasis on this word explicitly illustrates her view of the relationship with students. ‘Conversation’ here directly indicates that the learning strategist’s ‘consultation’ with students is just like talking and chatting. Rather than providing ‘guidance’, their work is more like a collaboration with the students to find solutions together. What Alice suggested, thus, is a horizontal communicative care with students rather than vertical and hierarchical leading.

This, on one hand, demonstrates Alice’s view of Learning Strategists’ position within the ‘university’: they are standing together with students to learn with them and overcome difficulties with them instead of blindly following the institutional apparatus to further accelerate the neoliberal educational regulation and assimilation. This perhaps is their attempt to establish closeness with the students — making them more comfortable to talk and, thus, providing more care and help.

On the other hand, the word ‘communication’ can also be viewed as a hidden counter-hegemony within the neoliberal education system through the returning and re-activating of students’ agency towards themselves. Because of the collaboration, rather than commands and force, what learning strategists provide to students then become optional suggestions. Namely, this is the power of can rather than should (Han 2017, 2). Discipline like should has the sense of coercion that will bring limits to the subject, but can is different (Han 2017, 2). It is optional and, thus, unlimited – it leaves space and agency for the subject to think and decide.

Thus, facing the neoliberal education that creates a forcible connection between ‘success’ and systematic assimilation, learning strategists subtly disrupt such order. Simply through their non-hierarchical help, they position themselves as students’ comrades. This re-stimulates students’ own agency in finding and deciding their own suitable way of dealing with difficulties and becoming ‘successful’ rather than being blindly guided and assimilated into the system.

 Alternative mindset: defamiliarize the surroundings and yourself

Building upon collaboration, individual learning strategists in their own distinctive practices embed more powerful counter-hegemonic voices inside the system. Physically, they are limited by the system – they don’t have enough power to change it. They then turn their counter-hegemonic voice into an immaterial form and plant it into students’ minds. I illustrate with the practices of two learning strategists: Jason’s attempt to let students rethink ‘learning’ and Alison’s effort in ‘challenging’ students’ psychologization towards themselves. Both strategists intend to evoke students’ awareness towards normalized practices and environments, enabling them to rethink the system and themselves. Their acts are learning strategists’ counter-hegemonic resilience towards the disappointing system, and attempts to seek and encourage alternative mindsets inside the neoliberal education system.

 ‘Learning is a process, not a result.’

“Students/faculty/staff don’t actually spend a lot of time thinking about learning – many students focus a lot on outcomes/producing. Learning is a lot messier, full of challenges, in need of support.”

This is Jason’s response to my question about why he was so keen to strengthen the meaning of ‘learning’ in his workshop. I interviewed Jason digitally through text after his student-facing workshop about using Generative AI to learn. In this workshop, despite the tight time, Jason dedicated a section to talk about the meaning of ‘learning’.

Learning, inside the university, is viewed as a normalized routine practice for students. With the rise of AI (e.g., ChatGPT), students start to incorporate it into their academic life: from concept clarification to writing homework. Such usage, in Learning Strategists’ view, entails ‘problems’: it will generate individuals’ over-reliance on it. Thus, addressing the limitations and negative impacts of technology has become an urgent topic in the CLSS department.

Jason chose to address these issues systematically. In this workshop, his ontological reflection on ‘learning’ serves to help students comprehensively rethink the usage of ‘AI’ in supporting daily academic practices. He distinguishes the difference between ‘AI learning’ and ‘human learning’, where improper AI usage in learning oversimplifies the human learning process and may lead to inefficiency in learning. For instance, learning is not a simple process. It is messy and does not always match our perceptions. Difficulties are desirable and necessary for good learning. Functionally, they stimulate more spontaneous thinking and emotionally, overcoming the difficulties may bring learners a sense of achievement and joyfulness (in Jason’s words, the ‘Ah-ha’ moment). However, the passive and blind usage of AI completely overturns such a process. It skips all difficulties in learning and the ‘Ah-ha’ moment. Enjoyment in solving difficulties in learning becomes eliminated, which may lead users to dislike learning challenges and over-depend on technology.

Through explicitly dwelling on the concept ‘learning’, Jason distances this word from students and defamiliarizes it. What his act passes to students is not only a critique of the over-reliance on technology but also a critical lens towards the causes of such dependence: the contemporary ‘idealization of learning’. Such idealization only focuses on productivity and efficiency in learning, but it ignores the messiness (difficulties and joyfulness) of experiencing the process. Thus, Jason’s practice is also a counter-hegemonic critique towards the ‘neoliberal learner’ who values the outcome more than the process in order to gain maximized productivity and become ‘successful’.

Such a reflection on learning is powerful. It evokes students’ awareness of their normalized practice and, also, the environment. Although this act is not changing any material conditions, it is a form of unlimited ‘can’ power embedded with ‘futurities’. It provides a basis for students to stimulate their own unregulated reflection towards the system and, in the future, find their own path in navigating inside the system.

 ‘It is not individuals’ problem. It is the structural, neoliberalism, issue.’

“It is not belonging brings me confidence. It is understanding why I’m not fit, gives me confidence.”

Alison spoke out this sense with an unexpectedly subtle firm tone — even across the screen. The hidden strength of seriousness and heaviness inside this sentence that lay behind her smile and gentleness is unstoppably but affectively floating into my body. This is her response towards one of CLSS and the Student Life department’s missions: building up students’ confidence through creating a sense of belonging to the community. In fact, her view of linking understanding and confidence instead of belonging and confidence is an important ontology for her, which shapes her counter-hegemonic practices towards students: inviting students to rethink themselves.

Having a strong background in social science, Alison always understands and is aware of the neoliberal educational system and its powers. She is frustrated about it, but she does every small thing she can to push for changes. Thus, in her early work at CLSS she tried to directly to present the historical and social context of the university to the students, but it was challenging: students, who come anxiously and dispiritedly, sometimes just want a quick fix for their own self-diagnosed ‘issues’.

Alison is critical towards the psychologization in students’ everyday life. Terms like anxiety are effective in categorizing students and correspondingly providing ‘solutions’ to fix their ‘learning issues’. However, these terms also overly focus on the present and future – they never explain the discursive environment behind those ‘symptoms’. Besides, there are also negative connotations hidden inside the terms. When students self-identify with these terms, they are also problematizing themselves – considering themselves as unfit and even failures inside the neoliberal education system and the promoted ‘successful student’ image. These linguistic categories thus also embody ‘willingness’ – students’ hidden desire to be involved and assimilated into the neoliberal education system and become ‘successful’.

Thus, she finds an alternative way of navigating through the conflict between students’ wish for a ‘quick fix’ and the necessity to address the social context, which is also her counter-hegemonic practice within the institutional limitations and the system’s constraints: encouraging students to rethink their own ‘symptoms’ (e.g., procrastination and anxiety). Students do carry their ‘willingness’ to be disciplined by the system and find her, but behind that ‘willingness’, students also carry their own original way of learning and being. No one is born with system-desired subjectivity, nor with an inherently docile body to be assimilated. Students’ original ontologies are solid ways of doing, but within the neoliberal education system, they become ‘ineffective’. In other words, these original ways, viewed by the students as the causation of the symptoms, are not inherently wrong – they are pathologized by invisible hegemonic social forces to become problems demanding improvements. And these negativities further become the forces pushing students to ‘willingly’ be disciplined and become docile bodies.

Thus, Alison will provide suggestions to help students navigate through the academic difficulties they are facing – but those suggestions will be largely built on students’ original habits. Also, these suggestions will be temporary as a strategic ‘quick fix’ to bring students out of their current difficulties instead of fully assimilating them into neoliberal subjectivity. Importantly, Alison will explicitly recognize and protect students’ original ways of being by wiping out those psychologized and pathologized terms.

Such recognition is powerful. It subtly disrupts the normalized self-problematization and anxiety of self-entrepreneuring (auto-exploitation) by students (Han 2017, 5). On one level, such practice gives back students’ own agency in front of the challenges and inside the systems. Meanwhile, the disruption of self-pathologization subtly invites students to reflect on other ‘inattentive’ things: their relationship with the system. Alison’s practice subtly reveals to students that their ‘willingness’ to be assimilated is not spontaneous – it is a coerced choice under the system that they may not be aware of. In other words, what she further implants in students’ minds is the awareness of the neoliberal education system: ‘It is never their fault for being ‘unfit’ to the system, but it is all led by the system’s arrangement and structure.’

Affective ‘guidance’: ‘I see it as a way to give back to the university’

In the above, we see how individual learning strategists embed their counter-hegemonic forces into practice within the neoliberal regime – despite the material restrictions they work more on students’ thought levels and implant the seeds of counter-hegemony into students’ minds to distance them from neoliberal subjecthood. However, the power of their ‘silent rebellion’ does not stop here. This section will briefly demonstrate the influence of their efforts on students via the affect embedded inside their collaborative help. Such affect is indeed highly iterative: it motivates students to become ‘helpers’ and pass these practices and affects towards others.

In my interviews with some students who are also staff, a common theme emerged: ‘reciprocity’. When I was curious about their motivation behind having ‘two hats’ inside the university (working as staff members in CLSS but simultaneously being current students at UofT), they offered me diverse but similar responses: some of them joined due to the university giving them scholarships and research opportunities, and some of them joined because they received help from the CLSS department during their academically difficult times. Thus, for them, no matter how busy they are as UofT students, the ‘help’ they receive is affective and entails a hidden ‘moral obligation’ to give back. Becoming student-staff in the department then is their reciprocation towards the help they receive and a way to express gratitude towards ‘helpers’.

In other words, ‘help’ here is transformative: it transforms the subject receiving help into the subject offering help through reciprocal affects. Nevertheless, what is transferred intersubjectively is not only affects (i.e., willingness to help others) – it is also the counter-hegemonic practices. These practices are well cited by the ‘helpers’, but, intriguingly, they may not fully understand the reason behind those practices as clearly as learning strategists do (e.g., dissatisfaction towards the system).

A conversation with Kathy, one of the peer mentors in the CLSS department, illustrates this point. Kathy implies her mentoring practice mainly surrounds ‘navigating resources’ to students. Based on her own experience, sometimes students’ struggles are related to not knowing what resources can help. Thus, she tries her best to provide options of resources to the students and encourage them to seek helps in multiple ways (e.g., attending workshops, finding past exams in ASSU, and different kinds of events). Besides, she mentioned that the major part of her role is just to listen — listen without any judgmental comments. For her, sometimes students who seek help just need someone to talk with — simply listening and using non-judgmental comments to stimulate their own reflection will be a good way to help.

Thus, what her act implicitly demonstrates here is a usage of ‘can’ power rather than ‘should’. This is similar to learning strategists’ practices mentioned earlier. However, strategists are more aware of the system and their goal is to provide counter-hegemony inside the neoliberal education system through giving students’ agency to resist systematic assimilation. On the student-staff side, they are still ambivalent towards the broader system’s issue, but due to their desire to help they choose to carry on such practice and affectively pass this counter-hegemonic practice further on.

In a Derridean sense, such imitation is a citational practice (Derrida 1988). The learning strategists’ immaterial counter-hegemonic practices become iterative through the affective help they unintentionally pass on to the students. Some of these students, who received help, are further transformed into ‘helpers’ and cite the previous helper’s act to support others. This then creates a circulation of help that makes the initial counter-hegemony even more powerful: through the affects in this reciprocal help, the counter-hegemony initiated by the learning strategists starts to be continuously, unexpectedly, and subtly reiterated inside the system. It keeps passing on: flowing, unstoppably, from helper to receiver and to the next and next.

 Epilogue: A note with hope

This paper is an examination of learning strategists’ counter-hegemonic practices within the highly regulative neoliberal education system. It examines actual individuals’ practices and experiences within the promoted values. These practices seem neither to have material form nor push actual changes in the system, but they are still powerful in a way that proposes and plants alternative ways of defamiliarizing the surroundings into students’ minds, inviting students to rethink themselves and their relationship with the system.

The paper also implicitly illustrates the indocility in every individual’s body and mind. No one naturally has the desire to be assimilated and disciplined. Individuals may seem ‘willingly’ subjugated to the power and system (e.g., learning strategists and students seeking help), but such ‘willingness’ is always conditional. There are always obscured forces pushing such acts to happen: students have to perform in the neoliberal education-promoted way to achieve ‘success’, and learning strategists have to follow the rules inside the system they dislike in order to survive. Willing docility is constructed. Instead, indocility is carved into every individual’s body. It may be a source of pain, but if individuals start to be aware of and understand indocility, it may be transformed into a powerful alterity inside the dispiriting system. Indocility seems to only have an immaterial form, but it is undeniably powerful: just like learning strategists’ counter-hegemonies, it entail affects and the ability to be cited, which already subtly circulate within the regime.

In fact, alternatives can be viewed as a form of antithesis in Hegelian dialectic. For Hegel, changes and progress are always pushed by continuous contradictions and resolutions in a system: thesis and antithesis may eventually bring ‘changes’ – synthesis (Yasmine 2024). In the same vein, no matter how weak these counter-hegemonies appear, they are still the antithesis within the thesis (dominant hegemonic neoliberal norms). Together, potential changes (synthesis) will happen.

Bibliography

Althusser, Louis. “Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses: Notes towards an Investigation.” In Lenin and Philosophy and Other Essays. Monthly Review Press, 2002 

Derrida, Jacques. Limited Inc. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1988.

Foucault, Michel, and Paul Rabinow. The Foucault Reader. 1st ed. New York: Pantheon Books, 1975 [1984].

Han, Byung-Chul. Psychopolitics : Neoliberalism and New Technologies of Power. Translated by Erik Butler. London: Verso, 2017.

Lucas, Yasmine. “ANT358H1S Class 9 Dis/Ability.” Lecture, Univeristy of Toronto, Toronto, ON, Jul 30, 2024

Shear, Boone W., Susan Brin Hyatt, and Susan Wright, eds. Learning under Neoliberalism : Ethnographies of Governance in Higher Education. New York, [New York] ; Berghahn, 2015. https://doi.org/10.1515/9781782385967.