Hearing Silences: Critical Literacies in a Secondary English Education Classroom

• In Event: The Truth Is in Our Stories: Advancing Humanizing Narrative Research Methods in Teacher Education

Abstract

Objectives or purposes:

The purpose of this presentation is to expand our understanding of critical silences of Asian American queer students as a mode of literacy that requires the use of counternarratives by educators and students in order to honor silences and the ways students use silence as tools of resistance.

Perspective(s) or theoretical framework:

Delpit (1995) states that teachers may encounter silence because they are ignoring the literacy skills that students already possess outside the officially sanctioned curriculum. Delpit notes particular silences that are harmful towards students when educators ignore students’ linguistic identities or lack the ability to teach directly to nondominant linguistic forms. San Pedro (2015) contrasts the pedagogical silences that Delpit highlights as a way to illuminate how generative silences can emerge as modes of agency by students to resist curricular erasures. As a result, it is necessary for educators to understand the various types of silences and how they work in educational spaces to better inform pedagogical practices towards critical literacy in the ELA K-12 classroom.

Methods, techniques, or modes of inquiry

In this process of “listening and storying, and the dialogic engagements that occur during the telling and receiving of stories that have the potential to effect change”, we are also centering the co-construction of human experiences, vulnerabilities, and multiple perspectives (San Pedro & Kinloch, 2017, p.347S). Furthermore, by listening to shared stories of marginalized communities, we recognize the cultural-based literacy practices that may be silenced, but through humanizing research, amplified and heard by others. By using autoethnography and narrative inquiry methods, teachers and students can begin to co-construct critical understandings of silences that exist in the classroom.

Data sources, evidence, objects, or materials

This research draws specifically on qualitative research methodologies through multiple forms of data: semi-structured interviews, classroom observations, student writing samples, and student narratives.

Results and/or substantiated conclusions or warrants for arguments/point of view:

The data suggests complexities that lay beyond the seemingly academically successful Asian American queer student in the classroom including an increased understanding of: 1) the dissonance and expectations of assimilation that people of color experience in schools 2) detrimental impacts of attributing silences to cultural differences, thereby essentializing Asian Americans when ascribing silences as part of an inherent cultural value 3) embrace more humanizing pedagogies in engaging with critical silences, especially for students of color.

Scientific or scholarly significance of the study or work:

This study is an important contribution towards understanding the literacies of Asian American students and to continue understanding the ways critical silences operate in the secondary English classroom. The implications of this work call for more culturally sustaining and humanizing pedagogies to emerge.
We need to analyze the multiple and, at times, contradictory ways we “embody and perform our socially constructed identities as we interact with schooling conditions and structures that attempt to standardize us all” (Miller, 2014, p.232). In the same manner, our understanding of silences has to be complex enough to encompass its contradictions and nuances.

Author

• Diana Liu, Teachers College, Columbia University
  Presenting Author