When What We Know Is Not Enough: Questioning Silences in Educational History

Session Submission Type: Symposium

Abstract

Educational history often depends upon written and spoken records to advance research and make meaning of past events. In conducting historical research, scholars have learned that there exist occasions when little is spoken or written but meaning abounds. This symposium will explore the meaning of certain silences from education’s past, questioning them from different historical, cultural, and theoretical perspectives. Exploring the phenomenon of silence in historical cases highlighting gender, racial, regional and subaltern experiences, the session seeks to promote discussion among participants about how educational historians are to make sense of and work with the various silences they encounter in their scholarly reading and research.

Sub Unit

• Division F - Historical Inquiry in Education

Cosponsors

• SIG-Indigenous Peoples of the Americas

• SIG-Queer Studies

• SIG-Research on the Education of Asian and Pacific Americans

Chair

• Karen L. Graves, Denison University

Papers

• Autobiography: Silences in the Politics of Language - Eileen H. Tamura, University of Hawaii - Manoa

• Drag and the Pedagogy of Silence: Performance and Gender in the Queer Student Movement - Jessica Clawson, University of Florida

• Some Things, Better Left Unsaid? - Amy E. Wells Dolan, The University of Mississippi

• Can the Subaltern be Educated? Examining Indigeneity in Colonial Schooling - Roland Sintos Coloma, University of Toronto - OISE

Discussant

• Karen L. Graves, Denison University