Making "Safe" and Subversive Space for Students' Lives Through Open Mic

• In Event: Disrupting the Discipline: Subversive Teaching in the Secondary English Language Arts Classroom

Abstract

Objectives
This paper chronicles how the addition of weekly, Open Mic time subverted the curriculum and
made space for students’ lives in the ELA classroom while maintaining “safe” spaces for student
learning in a multicultural literature course. White supremacy and heteronormative hegemony in
schools make “safe” a loaded, inequitable concept. Teachers may feel unsafe addressing
“controversial” topics, fearing retribution or loss of control. Student “safety” is even more
ephemeral, especially for non-normative students (see, e.g., Hope, Skoog, & Jagers, 2015;
Pascoe, 2007).

Theoretical Framework & Researcher Positionings
Theories of critical whiteness and intersectionality (Collins & Blige, 2016; Castagno, 2008)
inform our analysis. Students’ stories reflect experiences of race, ethnicity, social class, gender,
sexuality and the intersections among these in their lives. Yet, our own identities, as white,
middle-class, cisgender researchers, if left unchecked, may foreclose our understandings of their
stories. Therefore, we aim to practice “cultural humility” as researchers (Quigley, 2016, p. 26) to
act as guardrails and help us name our epistemological limits.

Methods and Data Sources and Analysis
Data come from a semester-long ELA course in a public high school with a total enrollment of
1,624 students (67.4% White, 20% Black, 5% Bi-racial, 3.9% Hispanic, 2.6% Asian, .1% Native
American, and .1% Pacific Islander). 23 students enrolled in the course: 12 male students (9
White, 2 Black, 1 bi-racial) and 11 female students (9 White, 2 Black). All students were
cisgender and none identified openly as LGBTQIA+. Data included field notes, video
transcripts, and student work samples. Using discourse and narrative analysis (Gee, 2014), we
examined two Open Mic narratives, one from Brenda, a Black student, who focused on her
cashier job at a grocery store where her supervisor directed her to treat “foreign” and white
shoppers differently; the other from a white student, Zeke, who described how participants talk
during on-line video-games. Brenda’s Open Mic raised questions about everyday racism and
invited classmates to consider their own responses in similar situations. And Zeke used his Open
Mic about Xbox Live to conduct a study not unlike the work of sociolinguists examining
discrimination based on ethnicity, race and language (see e.g., Lippi-Green, 2012; Massey &
Lundy, 2001).

Substantiated Conclusions and Scholarly Significance
Open Mic created a safe, subversive space for advancing equity and challenging privileged
norms. Both examples show how discrimination and prejudice permeate students’ lives and their
efforts to productively interrogate these experiences. These exchanges not only meet the ELA
standards, they exceed them, deepening students’ study of language, literacy, speaking, and
listening by connecting it to issues students will continue to encounter long after they leave the
ELA classroom. Whether this was “safe” for everyone is arguable. What is clear, however, is
that by holding space for students’ stories, the ELA curriculum-as-usual was subverted by
creating a venue in which students could safely practice having discussions that mattered to them
while also addressing an expanded set of ELA content standards in deeper, more meaningful
ways.

Authors

• Caroline T. Clark, The Ohio State University - Columbus

• Jill Williams, Westerville City School District