“We don't want your opinion”: Knowledge Construction and the Discourse of Opinion in the Equity Classroom

As educators who teach courses that examine social power, we often struggle with a specific form of resistance in the equity-oriented classroom: “That's just the author's opinion.” This “opinion discourse” emerges when students study scholarship that unsettles dominant knowledge claims and methods or when students are themselves asked to situate their knowledge. The opinion discourse could easily be read as simply an example of the lack of critical thinking skills among students. However, we believe that opinion discourse is more than a facile response to new ideas. We want to take opinion discourse seriously. We argue that opinion functions as a discursive project of resistance in the context of the equity-oriented classroom by solidifying inequitable power relations between the knower and that which is known. Our goals are twofold: to explicate how the opinion discourse functions as a specific legitimization of existing power relations and to unsettle the discursive authority that opinion offers.