Gaining Voice through Silence

This is a rough copy and paste PDF involving the format issues that this process includes (esp perhaps paragraph breaks not following the published version)-but sufficient for reading. For the good looking version please go direct to the journal: FORUM ABSTRACT This article considers silences and equality as combined from a theoretical perspective. Equality in and through chosen, deliberate and regular silence experience is seen as an equaliser: if no one is speaking no one can dominate. The article uses a bifurcated concept of silence: weak, negative forms and strong, positive forms. Only the strong forms are seen here as conducive to equality. Their opposite – a silencing – is seen as the creator of inequality. The argument suggests in order to tackle inequality in neo-liberal education a radical, cost-free, non-partisan solution of silence experience is available. The only way to fight a hegemonic discourse is to teach ourselves and others alternative ways of seeing the world. (Brodkey, 1996, p. 113)

Radical History Review, 2008

While teaching about race, ethnicity, and class from a critical pedagogical standpoint, we might not only encounter student resistance to learning about systems of domination but we should also be aware of the ways in which power, privilege, and exclusion in the larger society may be reproduced in our own classrooms. In this article, we recount how we used freewriting and discussions in an attempt to deconstruct the power dynamics in an upper-division seminar on Latinas/os and education. Though a majority of the students in the course were first-generation Latinas, several middle-and upper-middle-class White students tended to participate the most. This dynamic resulted in a situation in which class discussions were steered away from the focus on Latinas/os and unequal educational practices to a perspective that reinforced an ideology of equality and a climate that privileged dominant modes of classroom communication. Since these patterns were precisely the ones the course topics and readings were meant to deconstruct, we turned the gaze onto the classroom as we observed the reproduction of inequality there and used freewriting and discussions to uncover the unequal ways in which students were experiencing the space.

The question of the silence of women in the law school classroom is an issue ripe for legal educators to address. The relative silence of women in law school classrooms' has always concerned me, in part because I was one of those silent women, but primarily because women's silence is a larger cultural phenomenon. 2 Society often does not see those who are voiceless. Not all of our quiet students will end their silence by becoming law professors, for whom it is not possible to remain invisible behind a wall of silence. We professors have a responsibility to pay attention to who is silent and who is not in our classrooms, to consider why some students are silent,

... Silence in the Classroom 281 Page 10. T a b le 1 P re d ictin g silen ce in th e cla ssro o m u sin g m u ltip le reg resssio n an a ly ses D ep en d en tv ariab les P red ictor R eg . S tats S tu d en t silen ce T each er S ilen ce V alu e of silen ce R u ral S ch o o l In n er-city sch oo l ...

2014

However, teachers tend to spend most of their time attending to student talk. Anthropological and linguistic research has contributed to an understanding of silence in particular communities, offering explanations for students' silence in school. This research raised questions about the silence of marginalized groups of students in classrooms, highlighting teachers' role in this silencing and drawing on limited meanings of silence. More recently, research on silence has conceptualized silence as a part of a continuum.

2004

What is not said, is often more powerful than what is spoken about diversity, difference, and identity in U.S. classrooms. Examples are everywhere: Although no students of color may be enrolled in a course .t a prominent research university, members of the dass do not believe there is such a thing as institutional racism. A handful of women are discussed in course textbooks, all authored by men, but no one thinks it odd that only men have written accounts of women's achievements that appear on the syllabus. Gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgendered people do not speak for themselves, either, in the context of the course. Sexual orientation is mentioned in dass discussions only in sentences that begin '1' m not gay myself, but .... " Other dimensions of students' and teachers' identities-age, weight, ability, social dass-are not mentioned at all in the "professional" setting of the classroom. Every day, in these and a thousand other ways, silence helps protect the position and privilege of dominant groups in U.S. society.

Just recently, with my enrollment in graduate school, I began to explore why I thought these things about myself, my family, and even other people like my own family. I was 28 when I told university colleagues that I grew up in a trailer. In the back of my mind I wondered, “Will they think less of me?” Over time, I came to see what I felt, and sometimes still feel, as dangerous: dangerous to think that the poor and working class have done something wrong and need to be corrected. A feminist scholar, Valerie Walkerdine (1991), described how she learned to question discourses, like these, through her academic studies; she still could not find a space to talk about growing up “a working class girl who became a teacher and then an academic” (157). Like these women and many others, I want a space to talk about growing up as a girl who was subdued by dangerous discourses because I did not know they even existed, into a teacher who created a classroom where these discourses could be critiqued by my students and me.

Journal of Cases in Educational Leadership, 2017

Ms. Mendez, English Department chair in a large urban high school, has noticed a persistent pattern in the practices of her colleagues. These practices tend to be racially insensitive and emphasize a noncritical view that does not attend to students’ experiences and positions students from a deficit perspective. Realizing that such practices serve as social reproductions of racist and classist orientations that reproduce the existing social order, Ms. Mendez decided school leadership should be informed. However, she worries that the school’s leadership will not work to enact change and instead will take her concerns lightly.