Silences in Practitioner Inquiry: Investigating the Complexities of Student Resistance and Teacher Positionality in Classroom Research

• In Event: 47.026 - Silence as Evidence: Resistance and Epistemicide in Educational Systems

Abstract

In response to AERA’s 2019 call to examine what counts as evidence, we seek to question how we might leverage the work of teachers doing inquiry in their classrooms to “lessen inequality and increase educational opportunities,” to ask “hard questions about how things came to be the way they are and why inequality persists” in our classrooms. To do this, we uphold the knowledge of teachers researchers but also challenge the methodology to integrate how we as practitioners mobilize our positionalities.

As a burgeoning methodology, practitioner inquiry begins as an interrogation of practice, teacher knowledge, and epistemological assumptions (Cochran-Smith & Lytle, 2009). A practitioner inquiry stance has historically resisted markers of neoliberal authority by challenging positivist priorities and rationales in educational research (Cochran-Smith & Lytle, 2009, p. 9; Erickson, 2005; Lytle, Portnoy, Waff, & Buckley, 2009). To do so, it epistemically privileges what teachers and students know and learn together in classroom communities by taking up, examining, and valuing the complexities of students’ lived experiences (Campano, 2006).

Focusing solely, however, on student interest can lead to silences in what topics are taken up in class. As students and teachers resist neoliberal positivist outcomes in education by holding up their own knowledges as worthwhile and valuable, what silences are created or left unattended? Specifically, we understand that teachers and students work in educational systems that are derived from settler colonial norms, ones that have historically institutionalized Indigenous erasure (Battiste, 1998; 2002). Students have been inculcated into the same system of oppression and have naturalized its norms into their daily living. To absent issues of settler colonialism and the lived experiences of Indigenous communities from the classroom is to “scapegoat the most marginalized individuals in our education systems.” Taking this into account, we hold ourselves responsible for addressing it with students. To do otherwise is to commit epistemic violence. We ask how teachers might use a practitioner inquiry methodology to extend consideration and concern for topics beyond student interest, specifically the dismantling of settler privilege, while acknowledging how our power as teachers impacts the ways we talk about our positionalities and identities with our students.

In our two practitioner inquiry projects undertaken in the K-12 public school system in an urban centre in Southern Ontario, Canada, we purposefully introduced issues of settler colonialism to a Grade 3 class and a high school English class. Our findings suggest that at times students abstain from entering zones that put into question their epistemic experiences and sets of intersecting privileges. We both met with different kinds of student resistance to our deliberate introduction of symbolic systems in which they are complicit. We discuss this complex messiness how we and our students navigated these nuances. Despite differences in the contexts of our two classrooms and in our own positionalities as educators, there are resonances in the qualities of silences around issues of settler colonialism in schooling. We discuss the messiness around our dilemmas as non-Indigenous teachers facing these silences and resistances.

Authors

• Velta Douglas, University of Toronto

• Daniela Bascuñán, Toronto District School Board