The prisoner's dilemma: Classroom conflict experienced

Abstract

If learning is to take place in the community college classroom, communication among those who share that classroom must be a prerequisite. At this point in our collective experience, two barriers to faculty-student communication confront us. First, we have what might be called the McLuhan barrier, which presents itself in the form of students and teachers whose commonality-the semantic basis of communication-of beliefs, tastes, and concept formation is less strong than in previous generations and threatens to become weaker still. Second, we have retained the long-standing authoritarian barrier, the role sets which are typified by all those devices from grades to assigned seating that create a natural adversary relationship between students and teachers, and oftenbecause of the competition involved-among the students themselves. We must understand a bit about these mutually reinforcing barriers if we are to deal with them realistically at the community college level. One way to grapple with the problem of understanding these barriers is to experience them in operation and analyze the experience to see if it will yield possible strategies for classroom application. This is the approach that was taken in a presentation of this material to community college faculty and administrators. We begin with a short burst of media artifacts that are part of most students' commonality, but are somewhat alien to most teachers. We continue with a simulation of the win-lose