Joyful Noise and Abatement: Idle Chatter and the Undercommons of Oracy Education

• In Event: Marriott Roundtable Session Five
  In Roundtable Session: Critical Adolescent Writing and Literacies (Table 6)

Abstract

Imperialist functions of literacy have left classroom talk to defend its value against traditionalist views which rebuke, as one UK education minister put it, “idle chatter in class.” Oracy education risks doubling down on the white settler-colonial onto/auto-epistemology mobilized therein if it measures talk within this purview. Through the undercommons of black study, black church socialities, and poetics of relation, we revalue chatter and noise as modes of thought. We reorient the stakes of the learning conversation with its single lesson into a learning cacophony full of possible lessons, proposing new ways of valuing oracy education and new possibilities for participation. Our chatty inquiry as a former teacher and former student overlaps our shared classroom experiences with discussions of theory.

Author

• Lea Ehret, McGill University
  Presenting Author