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This page intentionally left blank.
Between Speaking and Silence
This page intentionally left blank.
Between Speaking and Silence
A Study of Quiet Students

Mary M. Reda
Published by State University of New York Press, Albany

© 2009 State University of New York

All rights reserved

Printed in the United States of America

No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever

without written permission. No part of this book may be stored in a retrieval system
or transmitted in any form or by any means including electronic, electrostatic,
magnetic tape, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise
without the prior permission in writing of the publisher.

For information, contact State University of New York Press, Albany, NY

www.sunypress.edu

Production by Ryan Morris

Marketing by Fran Keneston

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Reda, Mary M.
Between speaking and silence : a study of quiet students / Mary M. Reda.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-0-7914-9361-8 (hardcover : alk. paper) 1. Communication in education.
2. Teacher-student relationships. 3. College teaching. I. Title.
LB1033.5.R43 2009
378.1'25–dc22
2008028050

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
 For my father,
a musician at heart.
He taught me the
value of silence—the rests—in a
piece of music.
He was also one hell
of a storyteller.
This page intentionally left blank.
 Contents

Acknowledgments ix

Chapter 1 Listening to the Silences in Our Classrooms: A Study

of Quiet Students 1

Chapter 2 Considering the Problem of Silence 21

Chapter 3 Locating Myself: Between Speaking and Silence 51
Chapter 4 Situating the Study 73

Chapter 5 “What Teachers Want”: Exploring Teaching Practices 85

Chapter 6 Identity and Community: Negotiating Ethos
and Audience 119

Chapter 7 Learning to See in a Whole New Light: Reimagining

the Silences in Our Classrooms 151
Appendix: Teaching Practices 173

Notes 177

Bibliography 199

Index 211

vii
This page intentionally left blank.
 Acknowledgments

First I want to thank all of those students who participated in my research for this
project, particularly the five who agreed to be interviewed. Their generosity
of time, eloquent stories, and spirit touches me, and I am honored they shared
these gifts.
Much appreciation to Peter Elbow and Anne Herrington for their thought-
ful consideration, feedback, and willingness to listen and challenge me through
this process. I continue to be amazed by them. My appreciation to Elizabeth
Petroff for agreeing to work on this project with me. And I am grateful to Lad
Tobin as well, who got me into Composition in the first place.
I am grateful to my friends and colleagues. Kate Dionne and Susan Kirtley
are two of the finest teachers and best friends a person could ever hope to know.
Although it sounds like a cliché, it is no exaggeration to say that I would not have
gotten through this without them; their wit, compassion, and boundless intelli-
gence were a life raft. Kim De Vries, Sone Filipo, Mike Mattison, Pam Hollander,
Linda Fernsten, Justine Murison, Greg Tulonen, and Chris De Vries also deserve
enormous thanks for their support and friendship. Likewise, I thank all of my col-
leagues from Boston College, the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, and
The College of Staten Island, The City University of New York who have shared
with me their stories of “quiet students”; they convinced me that this project was
one worth pursuing. Finally, thanks to my family. I am particularly grateful to my
sister Ann. Words cannot describe her support or my appreciation.
This work was supported (in part) by two grants from The City University
of New York PSC-CUNY Research Award Program.

ix
This page intentionally left blank.
 Chapter 1

Listening to the
Silences in Our Classrooms
A Study of Quiet Students

No one dared
Disturb the sound of silence.
—Simon and Garfunkel, Sounds of Silence

It is any Tuesday, 2:29 p.m. I walk into the room that houses my
College Writing class. Students are pulling desks into a haphazard
circle we’ll need to dismantle later. As class begins, Frank writes
frantically, and I choose to believe he’s so enthralled by the discussion
of organization or academic language or audience that he’s feverishly
taking notes. A placid half-smile flickers across Maggie’s face as she
turns to study each speaker, nodding mechanically. Alice blinks at
me, pensively munching the end of her ponytail. And there’s a dis-
tinct possibility that Steve, my fraternity-brother-student, is asleep
under the brim of the baseball cap that shades his eyes.
By the end of class, not much seems to have changed with these
students. Frank writes, Maggie smiles, Alice chews, Steve’s baseball
cap bobs. They’ve written; they’ve been physically present; some-
times, they’ve even tried to laugh at my jokes. But not one of them
has spoken. Their silence, their sheer determination not to say any-
thing, their presence reproaches me.
Within a discipline that elevates dialogue and constructed knowl-
edge, and within a home writing program that supports this theoret-
ical standpoint by mandating practices such as student publications
and peer feedback, I work to develop a pedagogy of dialogue. For me

1
2 » between speaking and silence

this means a writing class that centers on student voices. Through

the exercises I choose and the daily routine we follow, I try to trans-
mit this vision of learning to my students.
Still, every semester I find a Frank, a Maggie, an Alice, a Steve—
students whose silences overpower the voices that fill class dis-
cussions. And on rough days, I’m startled to realize that I’ve begun
to resent these students and whatever it is that drives them into
their silences.
I know what I see: hostility, passiveness, resistance, lack of
preparation. I begin to construct explanations that account for the
silences—explanations that coincidentally define my students’ be-
haviors in terms of their flaws. But these explanations offer me lit-
tle that is useful: my students remain quiet. And I remain tense,
unable to coax or tease or shock them out of silence.

This is the introduction to a paper I presented at the Conference on College

Composition and Communication; I continued, tracing how my students saw
their own silences. But my audience focused on this scene, these all-too-familiar
students, my frustration. For many in the audience, the tension I alluded to was
compounded by their sense that a required course such as College Writing (the
single compulsory course at the university where I was teaching) often evokes
resistance that students express passively through their silences. During the
discussion, audience members enumerated for each other the crimes of student
silence: students who do not volunteer to speak in class; students who seem un-
comfortable, even resentful, when called on; students who appear unwilling to
speak to partners and small groups; students who seem to strive for single-word
answers whenever possible. We talked about the particular topics that seemed
to provoke student silence, challenging texts, the wisdom of our professional
discourse, and the imperative to get students talking.
The audience shied away from what I saw as the real heart of the paper:
that how I saw these students was often radically different from how they saw
themselves, that students see their silences through a different lens than we do,
that they use a different vocabulary to talk about classroom dynamics. It was as
if we were unable to move beyond our visions of failure to seriously consider the
challenges students’ perspectives might fruitfully offer us. In retrospect, perhaps
I should not have been surprised at the direction this conversation took, given
how deeply ingrained in many of us compositionists is the desire for student di-
alogue. Since then, I have heard countless colleagues say (in tones ranging from
desperation to undisguised contempt), “They just won’t talk. How do I get them
to/convince them to/encourage them to talk in class? I want to hear their voices.”
So the questions of this conference presentation have lingered for me.
How do the Franks, the Maggies, the Alices, and the Steves see the silences
 Listening to the Silences in Our Classrooms « 3

in our classrooms? How do they construct their own experiences in relation

to this issue that is so highly charged for teachers? What narratives, discourses,
and values do they draw on in these constructions? How do such constructions
affect students’ perceptions of and experiences in composition classes, in
particular? In this book, I attempt to address these questions through a quali-
tative study of one College Writing class at the University of Massachusetts
at Amherst.
Returning to my conference presentation and the responses of the audi-
ence will clarify my goals for this current, larger project: to question the
teacher-constructions of student silence as always negative, and to try to un-
derstand the ways students may see silence differently than we do. While I
believe our perspectives and theoretical orientations are important, these con-
structions are, by their very nature, limited. And yet these limited constructions
have virtually achieved (for teachers, at least) the status of a priori knowledge
about quiet students. Linda Brodkey argues:

We can only hope to transform a hegemonic practice with a narra-

tive that insists on interrupting a story told in a classroom or in the
academy that has acquired the status of lived experience, reality,
logic, science, or any of the other seemingly unassailable stories
that have acquired the status of authoritative discourse. The only
way to fight a hegemonic discourse is to teach ourselves and others
alternative ways of seeing the world.1

I believe these quiet students’ stories call into question our authoritative
discourse, our seemingly unassailable stories about classroom silence. While the
stories we teachers may tell about classroom silence and quiet students may
seem irrefutable, the perspectives of students offer us an important way of re-
seeing the classroom. A consideration of the experiences, constructions, and re-
actions of these students invites us to redefine and expand how we think about
these students, our classrooms, and the value of silence.

Background
In Teaching with Your Mouth Shut, Donald L. Finkel persuasively critiques our
culture’s image of the “great teacher” as one rooted in the archetypal act of
Telling. He claims that we mistakenly equate the “great teacher” with a brilliant
lecturer who inspires students with her displays of profound knowledge and
mastery of the subject. She has a contagious enthusiasm about the subject, and
she appears to be able to speak endlessly (to the enjoyment of her rapt stu-
dents). In telling, she gives knowledge.2 And the docile student—the one who
can be taught—must be silent in order to receive that knowledge.
4 » between speaking and silence

However, I see in our culture a second, perhaps even more powerful image
of the “great teacher”: the discussion leader who is able to inspire each student’s
passion, intellect, self-reflection, personal growth, and political awareness. Such
teachers, through their skillful combination of probing questions, inspiring com-
ments, and willingness to listen to students’ voices, not only teach their subject
more effectively but also teach their students to become better people. Both in-
side and outside the academy, this type of teacher (mythologized in mainstream
culture through such films as Dead Poets Society or Dangerous Minds and even the
more complex Half Nelson) is often represented as subversive in overthrowing
the traditional Telling-model of education that Finkel critiques.
In the movement away from a model of education that is centered on the
lecturing voice of a teacher and the monologic delivery of knowledge from
teacher to receptive student, the model of the “good student” has likewise
changed. Rather than celebrating the silent student (one therefore receptive to
the knowledge doled out by the teacher in lecture-sized portions), this new par-
adigm imagines a vocal, “active” student whose classroom activity is an integral
part of the construction of knowledge. In particular, much contemporary com-
position pedagogy is premised on this notion of dialogic education rooted in
the work of theorists such as John Dewey, Paulo Freire, and Kenneth Bruffee.
Dewey’s notion of “active participation . . . expression and cultivation of
individuality . . . learning through experience”3 anticipates contemporary ped-
agogy’s postmodern interest in collaborative learning. Like Dewey, Freire
claims that “authentic thinking” can only take place through dialogue; a
teacher’s fundamental mission is to engage in a dialogue with her students
about her views and theirs. Freire argues for the centrality of dialogue and its
liberatory potential:

To speak is to transform the world. . . . Dialogue is the encounter be-

tween men, mediated by the world, in order to name the world. . . .
If it is in speaking their word that people, by naming the world,
transform it, dialogue imposes itself as the way by which they achieve
significance as human beings. Dialogue is thus an existential
necessity . . . trust is established by dialogue. . . . Without dialogue
there is no communication, and without communication there can
be no true education.4

In the work of composition scholars such as Bruffee and Harvey Weiner,

“dialogue” and student talk have become a central component of the classroom.
As Bruffee claims:

Our task must involve engaging students in conversation among

themselves at as many points in both the writing and the reading
 Listening to the Silences in Our Classrooms « 5

process as possible, and that we should contrive to ensure that

students’ conversation about what they read and write is similar in
as many ways as possible to the way we would like them eventually
to read and write. The way they talk with each other determines
the way they will think and the way they will write.5

This emphasis on student talk and dialogue (sometimes represented as

“voice”) is one of the few issues uniting compositionists from divergent political
orientations within the field—from Mary Rose O’Reilley to David Bartholomae.
While voice has become a contested term and while some might dispute Bruffee’s
expansive claims for student dialogue (most notably, John Trimbur in “Consensus
and Difference in Collaborative Learning”), few compositionists would argue
against “dialogue” as representing all that is productive, empowering, and valuable
in our often fragmented efforts as a field.
Hepzibah Roskelly summarizes composition’s disciplinary concern with
dialogue in this way:

All of us compositionists believe in group work. In this post-

Vygotskian, post-Freirian age it’s impossible not to. The terms that
dominate our collective conversations in conferences and in our
journals—collaboration, peer response, discourse community, con-
structed knowledge—have become symbols for a pedagogical
agenda that values talk and activity as learning tools. . . . A person
learns in groups as he listens and speaks, and he learns about him-
self as well as the culture he inhabits. He may act to change that
culture; he most certainly will be changed by it.6

However, the ideal student-learners of composition’s “group work” are not

always those we see in our classrooms when this paradigm of education is imple-
mented. Rather than embracing dialogue, our students often appear to resist
teacherly efforts at collaborative learning and constructed knowledge. While the
silences initiated by teachers are seen as productive and natural (and generally un-
remarked upon), those silences initiated by students are troubling, problematic,
and disruptive. These quiet students constitute a central classroom tension for
many teachers—those who have a theoretical grounding in dialogic and collabo-
rative learning; those who value it on a practical or an experiential level; and those
who construct themselves as simply wanting to hear the voices of their students.
I do not wish to argue against this model of dialogic education; in fact, it
underlies much of my own teaching.7 But I do wish to consider what limita-
tions this model imposes. In this paradigm, the good student, the student who
learns, is the “active” student; active has become synonymous with highly vocal.
When our model of education posits highly vocal students, those quiet or silent
6 » between speaking and silence

students in our classrooms, then, may appear to mark some sort of failure or
breakdown of this pedagogy. And while many teachers internalize a student’s
silence as marking the failure of the teacher to sufficiently engage her students
or to implement a theoretical vision, others focus on the failure of the student to
meet the teacher’s or institution’s expectations. As I will explore in chapter 2, in
either of these visions, inevitably someone must be held accountable for the
perceived failure that is marked by silence.
Much of the scholarship about so-called “silent students” connects silence
with a literal or metaphorical lack or absence. Janet Collins’s remarks in The
Quiet Child, a study of elementary schoolchildren, typify such a position: “Al-
lowing children to be passive observers deprives them of important learning ex-
periences.”8 Such accounts are based on the implicit theorizing that students
are silent because they are passive, unprepared, or uncritical, and that without
outwardly visible and measurable manifestations (such as speaking), students
are not engaged. These students are constructed through a deficit model: they
fail to meet the minimum standards a teacher sets. Again, Collins’s work char-
acterizes a prevalent view: “Quiet pupils have to be encouraged to be more as-
sertive and find their voice in the classroom.”9 Such an assertion assumes that
if a teacher cannot hear a student’s voice then she does not have one, and that
an optimal combination of pedagogical strategies will enable a student to move
beyond whatever keeps her unproductively silent.
Other explorations of silence cluster around a concern for the political
and social implications of silence and what Michelle Fine and Lois Weis call
“the dynamics of power and privilege that nurture, sustain, and legitimate si-
lencing.”10 Feminist theory, critical pedagogy, and multicultural studies help us
define silence as a response to the oppressive mechanisms and the politics of a
particular culture perpetuating or enforcing particular codes of silence, what
Tillie Olsen has called “unnatural silences.” For example, in Organizing Silence,
Robin Patric Clair theorizes how such silencing is effected through coercion,
the exertion of force, and hegemony—the systems of control “‘normalized’
through institutions such as the family, education, religion, systems of law and
systems of enforcement, medicine, and general administration.”11 The assump-
tion of such examinations is clear: as the title of Fine and Weis’s volume sug-
gests, our efforts should be directed toward moving “beyond silence.”
Here it is important to acknowledge the growing body of literature that ar-
gues that silence can be a legitimate choice. Cheryl Glenn, George Kalamaras,
Adrienne Rich, and others challenge the more prevalent culturally inscribed defi-
nitions and interpretations of “the problem of silence.” In the final chapter, I will
explore this thinking in light of my students’ observations about the value they
perceive in choosing to be silent. At this point in my argument, however, I sug-
gest that these perspectives and rereadings of silence still carry far less weight in
 Listening to the Silences in Our Classrooms « 7

our conversations about the silences and quiet students in our classrooms. Students
who choose not to speak are described through a rhetoric of failure: these students
are seen by what they do not do rather than by what they choose to do.
Strikingly absent from most of these explorations of silence are the per-
spectives of students. It is a noticeable lack. Typically our literature shows the
attempts of teachers and theorists to understand, even to rationalize, the silence
of their students, with varying degrees of criticism or political justification. Yet
we have failed to consider the insights our students’ constructions could offer us
about this dynamic.12
With Linda Brodkey, I believe that “we see the world from a particular
vantage point . . . what can be seen by either the human eye or a human theory
is necessarily partial, that is, both an incomplete and an interested account of
whatever is envisioned.”13 Our constructions of student silence represent par-
tial and interested accounts, ones that may offer useful theorizing into class-
room dynamics but that ultimately fail to look outside of our own positions as
teachers and theorists.
In my preliminary research, I was struck by how radically differently stu-
dents view the dynamics of class discussions and oral participation than do
their teachers. For example, I have encountered several students who saw them-
selves as highly vocal when I had unconsciously labeled them “silent students.”
And in my observations of a class populated by juniors and seniors who were
Education majors, I was impressed by how vocal and comfortable the students
appeared to be in discussing professional texts and their own writing. The pro-
fessor concurred, arguing that they were some of the most skilled and sophisti-
cated users of academic discourse she had encountered in her numerous years
of teaching. However, more than three-quarters of these future teachers saw
themselves as “quiet students,” a label they understood to be problematic.
In addition, my preliminary research has suggested that students under-
stand their own silences in far more complicated ways than we do, often seeing
multiple causes and issues at play in a teacher’s request for oral participation
and their decisions to speak or not. Through the research that comprises this
book, I have had the opportunity to explore these issues further. In the broad-
est terms, this data can be grouped around students’ concern for teachers and
their pedagogies, their sense of identity and community relationships, and their
readings of silence that call into question our sense of classroom silence as in-
herently problematic.
Current pedagogy tends toward monolithic explanations of student
silence: it is the failure to engage in empowering dialogue, or it is the product
of political and cultural forces that makes silence an action. Both of these posi-
tions and their underlying principles strike me as valid and useful considera-
tions of classroom dynamics. But I believe our classrooms and our students are
8 » between speaking and silence

too complex to be summarized in such assertions. As Mimi Orner claims in her

critique of “calls for student voice,” classrooms are the

complex conjunctures of histories, identities, ideologies, local,

national, and international events and relations. Those who would
distill only singular, stable meanings from student silence ignore the
profoundly contextual nature of all classroom interaction. Those
who “read” student silence simply as resistance or ideological-
impairment replicate forms of vanguardisms which construct
students as knowable, malleable objects, rather than as complex
contradictory subjects.14

Orner’s critique is an important one, leading me to question our discipli-

nary construction of student silence as always negative. This critique is one that
underlies my project: when we speak for quiet students in the ways we have,
what might we be missing?

Study Design:
Collecting Silences and the
Roles of the Teacher and the Researcher
I collect silences.
—Heinrich Böll, “Murke’s Collected Silences”

This study draws on the rich and varied traditions and practices of teacher-
research that underlie essays such as Fishman and McCarthy’s “Boundary
Conversations: Conflicting Ways of Knowing in Philosophy and Interdiscipli-
nary Research,” Atwell’s “Everyone Sits at a Big Desk,” Curtis and Klem’s “The
Virtual Context: Ethnography in the Computer-Equipped Writing Class-
room,” and Faigley’s “Subverting the Electronic Notebook: Teaching Writing
Using Networked Computers,”15 to name but a few.
Joy Ritchie argues, “Many feminist academicians continue to operate
within a binary perspective, placing intellect against emotion, separating reason
from experience, and ultimately setting theory against practice. As a result, im-
portant connections between feminist theory and practice are masked, and we
lose sight of our common purposes.”16 I believe many researchers continue to
see teaching and research in such an opposition. For example, E. David Wong
argues that research and teaching have “distinct priorities. In brief, the primary
goal of research is to understand; the primary goal of teaching is to help stu-
dents understand.”17 Ultimately this dichotomy makes little sense to me in
practice, as my teaching and research inform each other constantly. Owen van
 Listening to the Silences in Our Classrooms « 9

den Berg claims, “insiders research what they teach; they do not cease to teach
in order to research. The goal of their research is to improve their practice; the
goal of their teaching is to enhance the education of their students so that the
students might become full democratic agents in the society.”18 To be both
teacher and researcher requires “neither a split in attention nor a conflict in at-
tention.19 This particular research project formalized for me the kinds of eval-
uations and decisions inherent, even unconscious, in the process of teaching a
composition class; in fact, I suspect I was a better teacher, as I documented the
kinds of investigations and analyses one always makes as a teacher. Further, I
was careful to vary course structures to allow my students and me to consider
issues of voice and silence in a range of ways, and I was more rigorous in inter-
rogating how and why I reached the conclusions I did about my own and my
students’ behaviors and responses. Jane Zeni believes that such research “opens
the boundary between practice and research, because doing research becomes
central to how one teaches.”20
I believe this study proposes a way to coinvestigate a question with stu-
dents, without radically altering the course structure and agenda to accommo-
date one’s investigation; the class that became the subject of this study
fundamentally remained a College Writing class, parallel to its sister sections.
Along with Marian M. Mohr, I believe “Teacher-researchers are teachers
first.”21 That is, while I designed my class to accommodate my research agenda,
my questions could never dominate or obscure the primary objectives of the
composition course I had been assigned to teach. I made the conscious com-
mitment that if the occasion arose that experimentations with classroom de-
sign, and so on might benefit my research questions without advancing
students’ learning, then these questions would, out of necessity, be abandoned.
(In the course of the research, however, pursuing my research questions did not
conflict with students’ learning, so neither objective was “compromised” by the
“dual roles” I inhabited.22) My “minimally invasive” research agenda did not
change the teaching and learning goals that the university Writing Program
demanded. Further, and most important, this research design allowed students
a maximum degree of control over their participation.
I chose to focus my research on the students in my own section of College
Writing,23 for several reasons. Because these issues of “voice” and “silence” are so
loaded for both teachers and students, asking students to reveal themselves is
also highly charged, requiring a high degree of trust and comfort that I do not
believe I could have achieved as an observer in someone else’s classroom. Of
course, this raises important ethical objections: Did students make “unfettered
decisions” about their participation in the study, without “fear of the conse-
quences of not participating”?24 Could my own students truly feel “safe” telling
me what they really thought? Did their classroom relationships with me alter
and limit what they could say? In order to account for those potential difficulties
10 » between speaking and silence

in the design of my study, I did not examine any data students offered until after
the semester was over. Their written reflections were kept in sealed envelopes
until their grades were submitted and students had the opportunity to renegoti-
ate their participation. Interviews were conducted the following semester.
I also studied my own class because I would be able to engage my stu-
dents, as research participants, in a wide range of classroom situations in which
they might consider their decisions to speak or to be silent by varying the struc-
tures used to elicit their voices and to shape classroom conversation, deliber-
ately building into the class opportunities for silence.
Finally, I was concerned that in another teacher’s class, the focus of my in-
vestigation might have shifted away from the perspectives of students to account
for the instructor’s constructions in a substantive way and replicated the teacher-
focused sort of theorizing and research that has characterized our discipline’s
thinking about student silence. To do so would have obscured the student-
centered questions that prompted this research.
After the initial phase of research during the semester (explained later in
“Sources”), I focused my research with students who self-identified as quiet stu-
dents and who volunteered to continue their participation in the project. I did
not deliberately pursue particular students I might have labeled “quiet.” (From
here on, I refer to them as “focal students” to distinguish them from the rest of
the class.25) Because this label of “quiet student” often carries a stigma for
those who understand it as a sign of deficiency or failure as a student, I believe
that my labeling students this way would have been counterproductive to my
larger objectives in this research. For me to have actively solicited students who
otherwise might not have chosen to be interviewed would have, in a significant
way, replicated what they already experienced when teachers try to “encourage”
their oral participation. Doing so would have centered the investigation on my
teacherly constructions.
Researching one’s own class evokes a question about a conflict between the
roles of teacher and researcher. I believe I was able to minimize this potential
conflict through my study design. Students could choose not to participate in the
project at all (although everyone did submit at least three of the four journal en-
tries); because I did not read any of the written material until after the semester
was over, students were assured that any (negative) reflections would not com-
promise their standing in the class. Periodically, students would prompt a discus-
sion about my research, through direct questions about how I became interested
in the topic, my perceptions of other teachers’ interpretations of quiet students,
and what I “hoped” to find through my research. Such questions seemed impor-
tant to address in the forum in which they arose, whether in one-on-one conver-
sations or in the full class. This seemed both a way to model intellectual inquiry
and research (a focus of this composition course) and an important and ethical
way to invite students to act as coinvestigators in this project.
 Listening to the Silences in Our Classrooms « 11

Breaking the Silence about Silence?

When I was designing this project, a colleague asked if I might have difficulty
obtaining data. How do you study silence? Would asking students to talk about
their silence challenge the very premise of the project? My colleague’s half-joking
questions point to a larger, more complicated issue—the potentially skewing ef-
fect that speaking about silence might have on the data, a so-called “Hawthorne
Effect,” in which “behavior during the course of an experiment can be altered by
a subject’s awareness of participating in that experiment.”26 In other words, would
participating in this project and talking about their decisions about speaking and
silences change students’ experiences of these, thereby invalidating the results of
the study? Ultimately, Stephen R. G. Jones’s rereadings of the initial Hawthorne
experiments27 that continue to influence the social sciences and research in the
psychology of education were persuasive to me: while the received wisdom may
be that participation in a research study skews the results, meta-analysis does not
support this conclusion. Further, Gordon Diaper’s examination of various stud-
ies, including those in education, leads him to conclude, “It would not be exag-
gerating to call the Hawthorne Effect a myth.”28 Thus talking about their
decisions to speak or to be silent should not have affected how my students per-
ceived these decisions or how they, in fact, acted in the classroom that formed the
basis of this research.
This, however, led to another interesting question: what does it mean to
break the silence about silence? Ultimately, in research methodology I loosely fol-
lowed the lead of researchers interested in silence, such as Keith Basso, Cheryl
Glenn, and Carol Gilligan, as well as Mary Field Belenky, Blythe McVicker
Clinchy, Nancy Rule Goldberger, and Jill Mattuck Tarule.29 Each draws on in-
terviews, asking participants to name their experiences and to make meaning out
of them. In this way, these researchers suggest that it is important to move be-
yond the traditional research paradigm in which “outsiders”—the researchers—
investigate, name, and analyze to invite insider-participants to speak for
themselves as coinvestigators whose voices must be heard. I wanted my research
with quiet students to follow in this tradition, in the belief that such “qualitative
research has to be collaborative arises from the recognition that participants hold
multiple perspectives on what is occurring in social situations and what the
meaning of those occurrences are. Educational innovation and research are so-
cially complex phenomena that involve the ‘process of coming to grips with the
multiple of people who are the main participants.’”30
Furthermore, in American culture, to “break the silence” is often represented
as a powerful political and social act. For example, in reviewing the first thirty Web
sites that emerge in a Google search of the phrase, it becomes evident how power-
ful even this language is, as it is used in relation to therapy abuse, family violence,
sexual assault, LGBT (lesbian, gay, bisexual, and trans-gender) issues, diabetes,
12 » between speaking and silence

Palestinian refugee camps, HIV/AIDS, elder abuse, rape counseling, witnessing

Christ, and colorectal cancer: the words “breaking the silence” themselves seem to
have power. In class discussions of this project, in written reflections, and in vari-
ous interview conversations, students seemed to understand the inherent weight-
iness of their participation in this project, even in very brief conversations about
classroom silence—that to speak about silence is, in some ways, a political act, as it
works, even in a very small way, as a corrective to the ways they have been named
and misnamed by their teachers and the academy to which they seek membership.

Sources
1. Student journals. At several points during the semester, my students
reflected informally on classroom silence by narrating a moment from the pre-
vious weeks when they or other students were (or were not) quiet and then
commenting on why this struck them as remarkable. Like Madeline Grumet, I
argue that “we are, at least partially, constituted by the stories we tell to others
and to ourselves about experience.”31 What stories students tell themselves
about their experiences of classroom silence32 constitute—to some degree—
their identities. These identities, I believe, shape students’ interactions in and
constructions of the classroom.
But I did not imagine these informal reflections as solipsistic exercises.
That is, “autobiographical reflection [was] understood not just as an individual
exercise but as a process that always takes place within a social context.”33 Thus
I asked my students to consider each reflection in a larger context (of our class,
of their educational histories) and to include their analysis of these observa-
tions. In their final reflections, I explicitly directed students to consider what
connections they saw between the stories they told.
Students created these accounts as part of their journals, so my project
imposed no additional requirements. Each student sealed her reflections in an
envelope and signed across the seal to ensure this writing remained private until
the end of the semester. Because of the complicated power dynamics that
emerged through working with my own students (particularly centered around
grading and evaluation), I was concerned that reading these accounts during
the semester would radically alter my perception of these students and would
inhibit what they chose to share. If students so chose, they were able to retract
their consent after the semester was over.34 Since many students did not per-
ceive themselves as “quiet” or “silent,” they were invited to explore their experi-
ences in other classes or to examine the silences of others.35
2. My own teaching journal. I completed a teaching journal follow-
ing each class that included the dynamics I established in a particular class
(i.e., structures for interaction, particular requirements for discussions) and a
narrative of what I saw happening in that class for both the students and me.
 Listening to the Silences in Our Classrooms « 13

Later it proved useful to explore the connections between my interpretations of

a particular class and those of my students in order to more fully understand the
radical disjuncture between their perceptions and mine.
This commitment to self-reflection made me conscious of those reactions
and constructions that would typically remain unexamined, even unarticulated, in
the course of a semester. Such a self-consciousness and acknowledgment of the
ways my own tacit values shape my work encouraged (in fact, forced) me to be
more careful in both my teaching and my research.36 As Anne Herrington argues:

We should stop and reflect on our actions, trying to identify the be-
liefs that guide us and reflect critically on them in light of alterna-
tives. That reflection may reaffirm our commitment to how we have
been acting or it may lead us to change. Regardless, if we engage in
such reflection, we will be more likely to actually make choices and
have a fuller understanding for our reasons for doing so.37

3. Follow-up interviews. These form the core of the project. I conducted a

series of interviews with five focal students who volunteered to participate in this
phase of my research; they identified themselves as “quiet” students, students un-
likely (or less likely than their classmates) to choose to speak during class. Cer-
tainly the perspectives of highly vocal students are critical in understanding the
classroom dynamics of discussion and student interaction and merit further ex-
tended exploration. (One brief example is that we often assume that vocal students
are learning more, learning better through their oral participation. However, this
explanation may not adequately account for their motives in “class participation,”
as several students in my study argue.) But in this present study, I was committed
to working with those quiet students whose voices may rarely be heard, both in our
classrooms and in our research. Teachers, researchers, and theorists have attempted
to speak for quiet students by offering interpretations of their students’ behaviors;
this study asks us to listen more carefully to what these students themselves can tell
us about their decisions, our assumptions, and our teaching.
My primary concern was to understand how students construct their own
experiences and to explore what those insights can offer us about the class-
room.38 Therefore, I relied on a fundamental principle that links naturalistic re-
search, in-depth interviewing, and feminist research—an interest in the
everyday experiences of others, an assertion that the thoughts and feelings of
others constitute valid research data, and the belief that the meaning they make
of these experiences is able to be made explicit.39 I chose interviews as one of
my primary sources of data because, as I. E. Seidman claims, they are

a powerful way to gain insight into educational issues through

understanding the experience of the individuals whose lives constitute
14 » between speaking and silence

education. As a method of inquiry, interviewing is most consistent

with people’s ability to make meaning through language. It affirms
the importance of the individual without denigrating the possibility
of community and collaboration.40

With each student, I conducted three open-ended interviews. In the first,

I asked students to describe their experiences with oral class participation—the
times it was successful or unsuccessful in their perspectives, moments they were
vocal or silent, and moments that were particularly memorable for them. In the
second interview, we explored the context of the students’ history, particularly
their history in school. I developed an Interview Guide,41 a broad list of ques-
tions, to shape the second interviews. However, my objective was to elicit and
explore those stories and issues that students suggested. These questions were
revised to reflect the specific local issues and themes that emerged from the
journals produced during the previous semester; I asked questions in an organic
fashion, following the direction of students’ reflections, rather than a rigid for-
mat. Indeed, as Ruth Ray argues, “Students are not merely subjects whom the
teacher-researcher instructs and assesses; they are co-researchers, sources of
knowledge whose insights help focus and provide new directions for the
study.”42 In the third interview, I asked students to explore in more depth both
the written accounts they produced and the interview transcripts. Students
commented on their own narratives and considered the themes, patterns, and
concerns they saw emerging in these texts.
4. Student essays. During the course of the semester, two students wrote
essays that seemed particularly relevant to this research. With their permission,
I have drawn on these works as well.

Listening to the Data

After a holistic analysis of the written reflections, I identified major trends in the
data and several candidates for interviews during the second phase of the research.
From the list of nineteen volunteers, I ultimately chose two men and three women
to interview. Of these, one of the men identified himself as white, the other as
Indian. Two of the women identified themselves as white, and the third—a citizen
of Israel—was born of citizens of the United States living in Israel.42
When selecting these five students, I looked for students who seemed to
express positions representative of the range of data in the written reflections.44
I also looked for students who wrote at least an average quantity, both narrating
and analyzing their experiences of silence to generate a depth of data during the
second phase. Finally, I wanted the sample to represent the class demographics
as accurately as possible. Given my skepticism about the generalizations that
have emerged from much that has been written about student silence, I did not
 Listening to the Silences in Our Classrooms « 15

design this study to provide conclusive data about gender or race. Nor do I
believe it is possible to do so. Looking for and believing we have found “the
answer” to student silence lead us to view students reductively and to teach pre-
scriptively. Instead, this study aims to ask new questions about student silence
and to reframe interpretations in a conscientious, deliberate way by understand-
ing the broad scope of students’ concerns.
I was interested in exploring the frameworks that students themselves use
to understand their own experiences. With both the student journals and inter-
views, I conducted inductive analysis in order to understand what themes and
patterns would emerge from the data. What meanings do they construct for these
experiences? What patterns and themes emerge from an extended consideration
of the stories of so-called quiet students? In Qualitative Evaluation and Research
Methods, Michael Quinn Patton argues that “inductive analysis means that the
patterns, themes, and categories of analysis come from the data; they emerge
from the data rather than being imposed on them prior to data collection and
analysis.”45 Unlike Patton, I do not argue that such patterns exist without a pat-
tern maker: the researcher herself is always implicated in constructing meaning
through the categories and themes she identifies. In order to minimize those is-
sues I might deem “important” to a discussion of silence (such as race, gender,
class, “resistance,” absence, silencing, etc.) and to emphasize quiet students’ con-
structions, my coding and analysis began with what Patton calls “indigenous con-
cepts,”46 those terms participants use to describe their experiences. I first
identified the terms and ideas that appeared repeatedly in students’ reflections
and then grouped related terms.47 The nine major categories were: (1) “comfort”
with other students; (2) “comfort” with teachers; (3) subject-related concerns;
(4) classroom practices (inhibiting or encouraging speaking); (5) “internal” rea-
sons; (6) alternate constructions of silence (including references and discussions
where silence was not seen as problematic); (7) environmental factors (such as the
time of day); (8) “difference”; and (9) references I could not otherwise categorize
(including reflections that did not address the questions and issues of the study).
Here it seems critical to acknowledge that those terms and categories I brought
to the study (focusing on silencing, absence, hostility, etc.) emerged quite infre-
quently in students’ accounts. The category “difference” appears in the accounts
almost entirely as a result of specific questions I posed, generally during the final
interviews with the focal students. Likewise, I anticipated a wealth of stories
about resistance to teachers or texts prompting student silence, as much of our
teacherly storytelling would suggest—these were conspicuously absent.
My analysis of the interviews initially took place through case studies. As
Patton argues, “The [purpose of the] case study approach to qualitative analysis
is to gather comprehensive, systematic, and in-depth information about each case
of interest.”48 This structurally reinforced my commitment to listen to the partic-
ular voices that often get erased in teachers’ and theorists’ constructions of quiet
16 » between speaking and silence

students. Robert E. Stake delineates three types of case studies: the intrinsic, the
instrumental, and the collective.49 My analysis of the interviews was a hybrid of
the first two variations, undertaken for a deeper understanding of the particular
cases in order to provide further insight into the issue of student silence, theoret-
ical constructions of the phenomenon, and pedagogical strategies as well.
However, my attention to these individual stories and particular con-
structions was not an end in itself. While I was concerned with investigating
the experiences of each student, I also wanted to provide a more macro-view
of the classroom. After a systematic exploration of the individual cases, I read
thematically across the five case studies in order to offer a new (if not unified)
perspective on student silence. How much time students spent on a particular
theme, the richness and complexity of those reflections, and often students’
conscious prompting highlighted the relative importance of particular issues in
students’ complex negotiations about speaking and silence.50 To borrow a term
from Peter Elbow and Pat Belanoff, “centers of gravity” and links between the
categories emerged, and I began to hear student silence in a new way.
Finally, I returned to my teaching journal and to the written reflections of
the entire class to consider any additional insights or reflections on what
emerged as students’ key issues or concerns. Ultimately I chose to include in
this text not only the voices of the focal students but those of all students in the
class in the ways they addressed the central questions I set out to explore.
Originally I had envisioned this book as a series of case studies. Each
chapter would develop a portrait of an individual student as well as a distinct
question or issue relating to the questions I posed about speaking and silence in
the composition classroom. In this way, readers might come to see these stu-
dents in the ways that I had known them. However, in looking at the data, this
plan seemed less practicable. First, all students spoke at length about multiple
issues they considered in the classroom, making it virtually impossible to select
a single focus for each. Their reflections frequently overlapped, providing me
with interesting avenues to explore in the subtle variations among their reflec-
tions. Simply put, case studies would prove reductive and repetitive, as my stu-
dents’ reflections were far more complicated and interrelated than I had
anticipated. Further, on a philosophical level, I was concerned that case studies
might lead to the conclusion that the concerns and reflections of these students
were individual, isolated, and idiosyncratic, thus more easily dismissed. Instead
of following a case study format, I centered my analysis on the questions stu-
dents ask themselves when considering their decisions to speak or to be silent.
In the following chapters, you will hear a profusion of voices, without necessar-
ily developing a picture of individual students. Ultimately, I decided this
slightly less satisfying exchange would have to suffice: while you might not see
Edward, Catarina, Lucy, Sarah, and Sanjay with the clarity I do, you will hear
the chorus their voices make—together.
 Listening to the Silences in Our Classrooms « 17

Why Listen?
Brodkey argues, “The only way to fight a hegemonic discourse is to teach our-
selves and others alternative ways of seeing the world.”51 It is in this assertion
that I see the value and significance of my study. The critique raised by inter-
rupting the authoritative stories we teachers and theorists tell through consid-
ering quiet students’ experience of the classroom will, I hope, work to transform
the theoretical and pedagogical understandings that underlie our disciplinary
constructions of student silence. In Barney G. Glaser and Anselm L. Strauss’s
terms, I believe my project will help in the development of a “grounded theory”
about our classrooms and our quiet students.

Chapter Outlines
In the next chapter, I examine a selection of teaching narratives and draw on a
range of theorists for a discussion of how we in the field of composition have
come to conceptualize student silence primarily in negative terms. In part, this
will draw on the work of composition scholars. However, for a more fully artic-
ulated, more carefully nuanced understanding of silence, I also consider other
discourses and other fields of study to complicate the picture we have drawn of
classroom dialogue and student silence. My effort here is to establish what our
shared interpretations of student silence are, as well as what issues and pre-
occupations in composition pedagogy these interpretations point to.
In chapter 3, I present an autoethnographic study of my own history of si-
lences, particularly those academic silences that strike me now as both turning
points personally and as crucial experiences shaping my perspectives as a teacher
and a researcher. My own history as a student is marked by striking changes in
relation to speaking and silence in the classroom: shifting from an eager, highly
verbal student in my elementary school years, through many incarnations to my
current position as someone who is most likely often perceived as “silent.” In this
chapter, I trace out what prompted each of these evolutions and the effects these
had on my school life. I have several purposes here. First, I believe these experi-
ences profoundly shape my current practices as a teacher and in turn shape my
students’ experiences. Likewise, I believe these constructions shape my agenda
in this project: I find myself personally committed to fighting against the com-
munity wisdom about what it means to be a “quiet” student. As Gesa Kirsch
claims in her exploration of feminist methodology:

The goal of situating ourselves in our work and acknowledging our

limited perspectives is not to overcome these limits—an impossible
task—but to reveal to readers how our research agenda, political com-
mitments, and personal motivations shape our observations in the
field, the conclusions we draw, and the research reports we write.52
18 » between speaking and silence

With Kirsch, I believe the exploration of my relationship to this research

is an ethical decision. In this process, I acknowledge the ways that my own ex-
periences and identity shape my work; likewise, I engage in the same sorts of
reflections—which are often difficult—that I asked my participants for.
The very brief chapter 4 contextualizes the student reflections in the sec-
ond half of the book. This chapter serves as a reference for readers—offering a
profile of the student population where the study took place, introductions to
the five focal students, and an overview of the College Writing course in which
this study took place.
Chapters 5 and 6 investigate students’ sense of classroom silence as prob-
lematic and consider the implications for writing (particularly in chapter 6).
This interpretation generally centers on the sense that they are not meeting a
teacher’s requirements. Using the data from students’ written reflections and
the series of interviews with five students, I explore in chapter 5 my students’
visions of the influence of teachers and particular pedagogies on their decisions
to speak or to be silent. Often, teaching practices designed to “empower” stu-
dents and invite their speaking (calling on students, requirements) are seen as
problematic, intensifying the pressures that students experience. Students sug-
gest that they are more encouraged to speak by what they perceive as “smaller
gestures”: the cultivation of teacher-student relationships, a teacher’s presenta-
tion of “self,” and focused attention on how questions are asked and responded
to. For these students, such efforts positively alter the dynamics of power,
knowledge, and authority in the classroom.
But there are limits to a teacher’s influence on classroom dynamics. As
I explore in chapter 6, more critical for many of these quiet students are the in-
tersections between identity and community. For example, many cite the “open-
ness” of the community and the ways that speaking invites public evaluation of
one’s response and intelligence, even one’s identity. This is problematic, but not
because these students fear conflict or want to avoid disagreement. (Indeed,
several enjoy debate-style situations.) Rather, they perceive the interactions in
classes as demanding risky self-revelation, often in anonymous communities
that do not have “real” conversations. In composition classes where student
writing is often a central text of the course, speaking is even more loaded. Thus
these quiet students are very conscious of the lessons about voice and audience
we try to teach in writing classes.
The final chapter investigates alternative constructions to understand
classroom silence, both in our professional discourse and in these students’ sto-
ries. Most significant in this chapter is the communal sense that silence is not
necessarily problematic. As one student says, “It’s not a crime to be quiet.” For
many, silence might be understood more accurately as a learning style, an op-
portunity for intellectual work through “internal dialogue.” Silence can invite
 Listening to the Silences in Our Classrooms « 19

students to weigh competing positions, construct theories and arguments that

reflect their values, and put into words that which does not feel already articu-
lated. For one student I interviewed, silence allows her to consider how her re-
sponses might fit into the “academic conversation” and to translate from her
home language, particularly for those concepts and ideas that have no direct
translations. Thus for these students, silence is the space of engagement.
Throughout the text, I offer implications and considerations for a
grounded theory of teaching. This research suggests several concrete pedagog-
ical issues to consider: creating a range of speaking situations, including small
groups and lower-stakes “real conversations”; devoting greater attention to the
development of the classroom community; and providing more opportunities
for reflective silence within our classes. But it also points to several areas for
further investigation. It is not enough to say we will study about silence in class-
rooms; we must also explore it with our classes. Working alone, there is little
opportunity for growth. Teachers create requirements, and students may com-
ply or resist or resent or misunderstand these expectations. But a critical dia-
logue about a teacher’s values and expectations and her students’ experiences
and perspectives invites a more complete vision—an expansion of the ways we
think about each other, our classrooms, and the value of silence.
This page intentionally left blank.
 Chapter 2

Considering the
Problem of Silence

Silence’s fame spread

throughout many lands.
—Heldris of Cornwall, Silence: A Thirteenth-Century French Romance

The Romance and the Classroom

Silence: A Thirteenth-Century French Romance tells the tale of Silence. Silence is
the extraordinarily beautiful daughter of Cador and Euphemie (whose name
translates as “Good Speech”). Because the king has decreed that no woman
shall inherit land or property, Silence’s parents decide to hide their child’s gen-
der and raise her as a male. Silence becomes an exemplary boy who is “so
charming, handsome, and brave . . . the mirror of the world.”1 This instigates an
ongoing debate between Nature and Nurture, two human characters: which has
more power over the development and beauty of Silence?
Silence eventually runs away with two minstrels in search of adventure,
causing the people of his2 homeland to deeply mourn his absence. Ultimately
Silence’s companions become so jealous of his skills and the accolades he re-
ceives that they plot (unsuccessfully) to kill him. When Silence finally returns
home, King Evan makes him a retainer. Queen Eupheme (whose name trans-
lates as “Bad Speech”) falls in love with Silence and attempts to seduce him.
Silence rejects these advances, and the queen threatens to disgrace him.
What Silence fears most is this disgrace and the loss of inheritance. A
complicated plot follows: Silence is sent to France, where Queen Eupheme
tries to have Silence killed. But without understanding the crimes of Silence,
the king of France finds himself unable to proceed with this plan. Silence ulti-
mately becomes a highly skilled and brave knight. Nurture apparently triumphs

21
22 » between speaking and silence

over Nature, as Silence is able to “overcome” the confines of gender to learn the
arts and skills of men. When Silence returns home as a hero at King Evan’s re-
quest, the truth about Silence is revealed through a trick of Merlin’s. Queen
Eupheme’s duplicity is made known, and she is killed. Transforming from
Silentium (the masculine form) to Silentia (the feminine form), Silence is made
queen and King Evan revokes his proclamation about women’s inheritance. Si-
lence’s many deceptions go unpunished, even unremarked, in the course of the
romance, while other characters guilty of duplicity are punished.
There are a number of issues for analysis in this relatively unstudied text:
the construction of gender roles; the theorizing about the relative influences of
environment and heredity on one’s abilities and behaviors; the political, na-
tional, and familial dynamics enacted; and the relationship between magical
and realistic elements in the tale. However, what interests me in the context of
this project is the role of Silence herself and the relationships created around
her. While the character’s name clearly seems to point to the silence about her
gender, a literal reading of her tale offers broader questions that connect to this
study. How do we know silence? What relationship do we have with silence? To
what extent do we read our students’ silences as “natural”? How is silence con-
sciously or unconsciously fostered, and how does this affect our responses to it?
What do we know about silence beyond the contextual and linguistic associa-
tions we have taken for granted? What assumptions do we make, what conclu-
sions do we draw based on the outward appearances of silence?
In the romance, Silence in both her “natural” and “nurtured” roles, that is,
in her incarnations as woman and man, is represented as the picture of perfec-
tion. In fact, Nature and Nurture argue endlessly about which can claim re-
sponsibility, and therefore praise, for Silence’s beauty and accomplishments.
Silence is the child of “Good Speech,” who ironically speaks very little and is
virtually powerless in the story. Silence is deeply attractive to “Bad Speech,”
who eventually threatens his very life and existence. It seems noteworthy that
the names “Good Speech” and “Bad Speech”—Euphemie and Eupheme—are
virtually identical, differing by a single letter. And the triumphant elevation and
revelation of Silence’s true self are dependent upon the destruction of seduc-
tive “Bad Speech.” In both her masculine and feminine incarnations, Silence is
celebrated for beauty, skill, and courage.
Unlike Cador’s claim at the birth of his child, “silence relieves anxiety,”3
silence has come to occupy a radically different place in the culture of Ameri-
can academic life. Certainly there are moments that require silence in the class-
room: exams, writing exercises, or a teacher or student speaking will necessitate
silence. These silences, initiated by teachers, are good silences. Such moments
are generally an implicit part of the social contract of the classroom: teachers
exert control over the voices of their students to foster a productive learning
 Considering the Problem of Silence « 23

environment, and students typically share this understanding about when to

maintain polite, respectful silences. While more attention needs to be paid to
these and the productive silences of listening, as the work of Jacqueline Jones
Royster and Krista Ratcliffe encourages us, the silences perceived as problem-
atic tend to preoccupy us and populate our stories about our classrooms.
It is these other silences—initiated and controlled by students—that I
explore here. Far from the world of the romance of Silence, we would not
mourn the loss of this kind of silence; rarely do we see it as beautiful, heroic, or
noble. Rather than celebrating student-initiated silence, typically we work to
prevent its conception, preferring instead to center our energies on the tension
between “good speech” and “bad speech” in the classroom, the exploration of
the “good speech” of critical thinking, and (simplistically put) a debate about
the “natural” or constructed quality of the silence of our students. Although it
exerts a mighty influence over us, Silence occupies no heroic position in our
classrooms, nor does it ensure any kind of equity. Instead, it is often constructed
as the enemy of teaching, learning, and even teachers themselves. To extend the
metaphor, in our imagination, silence might be born from “bad speech” (such as
racist or sexist discourse), but “good speech” begets more speech, not silence.
So is there an analogy to be made between composition teachers and any
of the characters in Silence: A Thirteenth-Century French Romance? Perhaps it is
with the wandering minstrels who grow so envious and resentful of Silence’s
power that they try to rid themselves of him. And like the people of his home-
land, we are accustomed to seeing Silence in one particular role, although we
experience no joy, no celebration, when Silence’s “true” nature is revealed. But
I would suggest that if there are any characters in the romance we might pro-
ductively emulate, it is the king of France and his advisors, who conclude that
they cannot, in good conscience, kill Silence without a fuller understanding of
his purported crimes. We might do well to remember that the deceptions Si-
lence performs are legitimate, even just; Silence can be an active presence. Be-
fore trying to rid ourselves of the “crimes” of silence, I believe we need to
understand it more fully, including our own (perhaps unconscious) participa-
tion in the perpetuation of silence and the complicated messages we send to our
students about the value of speaking and silence.
The difficulty posed by student silence in our classrooms, I argue, is one
of the most difficult, least easily reconciled challenges of composition pedago-
gies: the mismatch between theory and practice, between talking pedagogy and
enacting it, ultimately calls these pedagogies into question. Put in the most
basic terms, in dialogic education, student-initiated silence has often come to
mean that something is not working. Of course, to see dialogue and silence as
mutually exclusive entities is a reductionist binary. By definition, dialogue re-
quires the silence of listeners in addition to the voices of speakers. And as some
24 » between speaking and silence

of the students in this study suggest, active listening demands engaged silence.
Furthermore, many of us see classroom conversation and periods of silence in
a sort of dialogue with each other, with “quiet” activities such as journal writing
or drafting, leading to communal exploration, and conversation concluding in
private writing and reflection. However, for many of us, these kinds of silences
are seen as productive when a teacher initiates them; for students to choose
silence may feel problematic, even antagonistic.
When we as teachers focus so intensely on our relationship to student si-
lence and the relationship of silence to our pedagogies and goals, we can over-
look students’ relationship to their own voices and silences. It is this complex
but underexplored dynamic that I investigate here. How do my students hear
their own and other students’ silences? Do they, like most teachers, read their
silences negatively? What constructions do they offer to account for their si-
lences, particularly in American school systems that place such a high premium
on the highly vocal “good” student? If we take seriously our students’ readings,
then what do their constructions tell us about our own? Is it possible to read
outside of the model of silence as lack, passivity, absence? As the indication of
alienation or disempowerment? And ultimately, is it possible for us as teachers
to maintain our concern for counteracting the mechanisms that work to silence
students and still respect their right to silence?
As this book will suggest, I have many questions about much of the writ-
ing that has been done about silence and dialogue in the classroom from teach-
ers’ perspectives. I do ultimately find that it coincides with my own values about
teaching and learning. Put rather reductively, I do think that learning generally
takes place through dialogue, and that silence in our classrooms may be cause
for concern. But I also believe that such constructions of the “problem” of stu-
dent silence may further limit the roles we see for “good students,” marginaliz-
ing quiet students even further by defining them as deviant from the supposed
“center” of highly vocal students.

The Narrative and the Classroom

The eternal silence of these infinite spaces terrifies me.
—Blais Pascal, Pensées

Moving from the fantastic world of Silence in the French romance, I turn
now to teaching narratives about silence in classrooms as a useful starting point
for understanding our disciplinary constructions of student silence. Narratives
are a useful research methodology, for several reasons. While it has been argued
that narratives and narrative analysis are valuable because they are “closer to ex-
perience” than methodologies of observation and experimentation, I make
 Considering the Problem of Silence « 25

a less problematic claim: narratives provide valid research data because they
reflect the ways (or one of the ways) we construct our own experience. If,
as Brodkey claims, “experience [is] the stories we tell about ourselves,”4 then
narrative writers gather for themselves and others the data of experience. Eleanor
Kutz and Hepzibah Roskelly validate this sort of thinking:

“Narrative knowing” accounts for a large part of the way we make

sense of our world, and we use it in our must mundane conversa-
tions as well as our most significant texts. . . . When we select details
from the flux of experience and shape them into a story, we’re also
engaged in naming, abstracting from, and restructuring the raw data
of the physical world, and in finding its patterns of meaning.5

In other words, narrative offers a useful way of gathering and analyzing

the data of lived experience in order to make sense of it. By structuring previ-
ous experience, narratives invite both reader and writer to “envision endings
from the very beginning”6 and to consider questions about the implicit inter-
pretations and values that shape these stories. In this definition, active analysis
is inherent in the process of narration.
These stories offer a variety of interpretations of silence in the classroom.
It is important to note that teacher-authors have constructed these interpreta-
tions for themselves and for an audience of other teachers; one might legitimately
wonder how the students represented might have narrated and interpreted these
moments themselves.
As previously mentioned, I see two major kinds of silence in the class-
room: those implemented by the teacher and those initiated by students. When
teachers require silence, it is often for pedagogical purposes, for example, during
tests, individual reading or writing, or while one person is speaking. In these
situations, silence is seen as necessary for the intellectual work of the classroom
to be done. When students are silent at these times, their behavior is inter-
preted (at least by the teacher) as respectful compliance (or, at the very least, the
shrewd appearance of compliance). Perhaps less common is the use of silence as
a means of control, even punishment, by a teacher. That is, as teachers we may
not have our students put their heads down on their desks for misbehaving, but
we certainly exert control to censor language, topics, or responses considered
“inappropriate.” In these ways, behaving appropriately—abiding by teacher-
initiated silences—affords students citizenship in that classroom.
This chapter primarily investigates teachers’ interpretations of those
more complicated student-initiated silences perceived, by and large, negatively:
the inability to speak, an unwillingness to “participate,” resistance, hostility, lack
of preparation or engagement, disempowerment or alienation, unwillingness
26 » between speaking and silence

to “go along” with the teacher. In the following chapters, I explore students’
interpretations of silence that suggest definitions that challenge the resistance/
compliance or alienation/enculturation dichotomies upon which teachers’ nar-
ratives often rely. When students do see silence negatively, this is premised on
their sense of failing to meet teachers’ expectations; their defintions rely on the
negotiation of relationships with one’s sense of self, with one’s peer community,
and with one’s teacher.

Narrative Visions:
The Power of Speech
When we were discussing Northampton [a local town] in class, I found
myself wanting to be more involved. . . . When it was my turn to state my
views, I really felt an urge to explain my own opinion, and try to let others
know where I was coming from. I was actually excited to tell people. . . .
Even after my turn was over, I found myself calling out comments to
others. . . . After class I felt very satisfied that I had the chance to explain
what I thought, even if the others didn’t remember what I had said . . .
I was definitely involved in participating aloud, [as] opposed to my normal
commenting that remains in my head.
—Jenna, student

Many teaching narratives position silence as an obstacle to be overcome; on the

other side of this barrier is a richer, more vibrant promised land of dynamic class-
room interactions. The goal is clear and unambiguous—get students talking, and
make one’s “reticent readers turn into nonstop talkers.”7 In Victor Villanueva’s ac-
count, his students’ collective ability to confront issues of race and class is repre-
sented as contingent upon the movement out of silence by particular students. And
Patricia Shelley Fox’s student who speaks out after a long silence is crucial for “our
epiphanies . . . each has cleared the path ahead at the same time promising to make
the journey more challenging, but finally richer and more fully our own.”8 However,
it is in Kim Stafford’s and Lynn Bloom’s accounts that the most dramatic expres-
sions of the need to move students out of their silences are found. In recounting his
students’ visit to a prison, Stafford reflects on the “forty faces made somehow mute
by the fact of our confinement.”9 Here silence is conflated with the lack of mobil-
ity and the sense of guilt for wrongdoing symbolized by physical imprisonment.
Bloom’s account of her own history as a student and a teacher is one marked by
silences and omissions—about the workings of sexism and power dynamics in var-
ious universities. She concludes that if our “commitment to teaching English is . . .
for life,” then we “will have to raise [our] voice[s].”10
What interests me in these accounts is the remarkable similarity between
the representations of the transformative power of speech. The move out of
 Considering the Problem of Silence « 27

silence is depicted as salvation, sometimes quite literally. In this dramatization,

then, silence is much more significant than a decision not to speak: student
silence is demonized. There is no space to see student silence as anything but an
obstacle, the roadblock to a teacher’s noble goals.

Not Complying:
The Power of Student Silence
As a quiet student in class, I find myself troubled by the idea that teachers
automatically assume that because a student is quiet, [she doesn’t] under-
stand what’s going on or something is wrong.
—Tracy, student

In seeking out the narratives I discuss in this chapter, I was struck by how fre-
quently stories of classroom silence appear in our professional writing. For ex-
ample, in the collection Narration and Knowledge, ten of the nineteen stories
explicitly focus on student silence, despite another organizing principle for the
volume. Nine of the seventeen essays in Composition and Resistance, edited by
C. Mark Hurlbert and Michael Blitz, contain a narrative of classroom silence.
The narratives in these two volumes, along with the many embedded narratives
appearing in the pages of a journal such as College English, suggest a disciplinary
fascination with this particular classroom phenomenon. Some of the themes
that emerge in looking at a group of such narratives—resistance, disengage-
ment, hostility—may help explain this preoccupation.
It is important to define the term resistance as I am using it here. His-
torians use it to denote struggles for liberation from an occupying power; psychol-
ogists employ it to describe unconscious opposition to recalling painful memories
or repressed desires. In medicine, it describes the body’s ability to withstand dis-
ease, toxins, or infection, while in critical pedagogy, it signifies the political act of
asserting agency. In these discourses, resistance may be natural and self-protective
or organized and liberatory. What is resisted is harmful, dangerous, limiting.
These are not the definitions of resistance I see at play in these teaching
narratives: these students cannot (and implicitly should not) be automatically
equated with the French underground, the ego, white blood cells, or composi-
tion’s critical thinkers. These students are resisting their teachers who are, em-
phatically, not harmful or dangerous. Instead, in these narratives, an even more
basic definition of resistance operates in their depictions of students. Their re-
sistance is constructed as a refusal to comply, whether through deliberately op-
positional behaviors, expressions of hostility, or passive noncompliance. In these
teachers’ narratives, they themselves become that which is resisted, a process
that is often represented as illogical and counterproductive.
28 » between speaking and silence

There is a virtually unanimous definition of students’ speech as participa-

tion and the resulting equation of quietness to nonparticipation or absence from
the classroom. Kutz and Roskelly’s opening chapter of An Unquiet Pedagogy
dramatizes this dynamic. They offer an admittedly generalized picture of the
English classroom, one they expect teachers will find “disquieting[ly] familiar.”11
Of classroom interaction and dialogue, they note:

Although the teacher may draw a particular student into the les-
son, more often communication in the classroom takes familiar
forms that both teacher and student know intuitively. . . . They [the
students] give answers, and “they” are almost always the same ones
who seem always to raise their hands. Every once in a while, the
teacher surprises somebody by calling a name, but the selected stu-
dent seldom responds with much more than a mumble, and she
goes back to the familiar raised hand with a sigh of relief. Some
students stay on the fringes of this “discussion”; they never respond
and the teacher has learned never to call on them.
[When students are doing individual work] there’s silence in the
room now, except for a few complaints. . . . Everyone is waiting for
the bell to ring. She [the teacher] can also count on their lack of
enthusiasm for any of the tasks they accomplish.12

Silence occupies two very different positions in this text. Initially it is a sign
of resistance or, at the very least, patterned passivity in response to the class dis-
cussion and, therefore, the teacher. In the second half, silence, while perhaps mark-
ing disengagement (“everyone is waiting for the bell to ring”), also signifies
compliance; students are obediently doing what the teacher requires. Silence
equals control.
Another example of silence as nonparticipation comes from Elizabeth
Chiseri-Strater’s ethnographic study. She comments, “Anna earns her commu-
nity membership by adding her point of view,”13 as if this membership in a class
must be earned, and that to be a “quiet” student may very well legitimately ex-
clude one from that community. In a similar move, Villanueva notes of one
quiet student, “He’s not much of a participator in class. He won’t be on this day
either, though he’ll end up playing a part in the drama.”14 And Sharon Hamil-
ton recalls, “Tamla who, until this moment [when she made an oral comment],
had not participated in the discussion.”15
For a teacher who is seeking “class participation,” speech may appear to
be the only means of defining or eliciting that participation. But I wonder, is it
possible to “participate” mentally or to “play a part in the drama” of the class-
room without speaking? For a discussion to function effectively, yes, people
must be willing to speak. From this point of view, the transitive meaning
 Considering the Problem of Silence « 29

of “participate” seems to apply: students take part in a discussion. But it also is

possible to argue that students who are active, engaged listeners also take part
in the discussion. This suggests another broader way we might think about this
slippery notion of “class participation.” What if a student does not learn best by
speaking? Can we say that she is mentally participating in the intransitive sense
of the word—sharing in or partaking of the discussion?
Perhaps because silence is typically defined as lack or absence, and because
it offers little data for interpretation, teachers have come to these common
“truths” about silence as a sign of disengagement and/or hostility. At best, “Most
of the faces register only politeness. A foot kicks the desk chair of the person in
front of it. ‘sorry.’ Several rubberneck the clock. Nothing to make fun of. Not
much to interpret, I suppose.”16 More typically, though, these students are “ag-
gressively bored” and “distract [the rest of the class] . . . they [are] responsible for
the unproductive mood of the classroom”17; they show “their lack of enthusiasm
for any of the tasks they accomplish”18; they are “aggressively apathetic.”19 And
when silence is not explicitly connected to resistance and hostility, it is often
linked to a student’s withdrawal. Nancy Sommers remembers a student she could
not “reach” as “announcing her presence by stretching her hand out on her semi-
nar table, then spending most of our class time drawing intricate Escher-like
worlds within worlds on the palms of her hands and in the webs of fingers . . .
for most of our assignments she struck a Bartleby pose of ‘I prefer not to.’”20 And
Villanueva’s “Silent Ones” are echoed in the noncommittal “Mona Lisa half-
smile”21 of Patricia Shelley Fox’s student.
All of these textual representations of quiet students as “nonparticipat-
ing” grow out of composition’s interest in collaborative learning and “student-
centered pedagogies” that are driven by the presence of students’ literal, audible
voices. Certainly these form a central component of my own teaching. But I be-
lieve these narrative constructions of quiet students reveal how limited a model
of the “good student” we have created. In fact, I would argue that the range of
acceptable and appropriate student behavior becomes even further limited by
these ideologies. This becomes even more problematic for me when I consider
the ways that this model of the highly vocal student as “good student” is often
gender-, class-, and culture-bound. As Brodkey claims about the denial of
middle-class values implicit in educational discourse, “such a discursive practice
reduces all who study and teach to one version of the good student and one ver-
sion of the good teacher without benefit of discussion.”22
I suspect, as well, that underlying these representations of silence is this
concern: what we cannot see, we cannot evaluate. And if we cannot evaluate
students, then how do we know that they are learning, that they are even think-
ing? Even within ostensibly student-centered pedagogies, I think there is a ten-
sion between what we would like our students to be (those we would most like
to teach) and the students we see before us who do not meet that ideal.
30 » between speaking and silence

Since student-talk is one of the ways we evaluate our success as teachers and
the effectiveness of our pedagogies, student silence is more problematic than a les-
son plan gone awry. If we are committed to pedagogies based on dialogue and the
idea of socially constructed knowledge, then student silence forces us to ask this
question: who is to blame for this pedagogy not working? Charles Moran, in his re-
flections on returning to teaching in a traditional classroom, says his class begins

on an ominous note: I begin to feel I have to do more than I am

doing, because I’m feeling that not much is happening. “I’m thinking
the class is pretty quiet—not sure how to bring them together in groups.” 23

Such reflections are strikingly rare though; the breakdown in pedagogy is

more typically represented as the failure of students.
In the narratives I have explored, student-initiated silence was interpreted—
with a single exception—negatively, as the sign of a problem, the manifestation of
students’ resistance. Frankly, these Bartleby-like students are troubling; they can
become a disruptive, less contained version of the passive resistance of the
scrivener in their refusal to speak as we ask, in their silent “I would prefer not to.”
At the extreme (one I confess to have experienced), their “manner . . . nettled me.
Not only did there seem to lurk in it a certain calm disdain, but his perverseness
seemed ungrateful, considering the undeniable good usage and indulgence he had
received from me.”24
Writers such as Bonnie TuSmith read silence as an indication of students’
willful hostility. She points to the racist dismissal she hears underlying her stu-
dents’ silence over the interpretation of texts that utilize Black English Vernac-
ular: “A defensive ‘yes’ was the answer, and a dismissive ‘end of discussion’
attitude.”25 The accusatory tone I read in her recollection seems to have been
heard by her students as well. She recounts that after a question she posed,
“silence prevailed. Finally, one student challenged, ‘Are you saying we’re racist
because we didn’t like her reading?’”26
Not all of our accounts or our experiences are so extreme. For example, au-
thors such as Ira Shor, Philip Brady, Cheryl Johnson, and Lad Tobin construct
explanations that account for these resistances as reasonable responses to inter-
personal dynamics, institutional alienation, and social constructions. While their
students’ silences are troubling, ultimately these resistances are seen as legitimate
responses to the oppressive rhythms and routines of education. For example, in
the opening chapters of When Students Have Power and Empowering Education,
Ira Shor begins with a dramatic depiction of resolutely silent students. He recalls:

My confidence was shaken a little that first day when I reached

the open door of B-321 and heard not a sound. Was this the right
 Considering the Problem of Silence « 31

classroom? Had my room been changed at the last minute? I took a

step forward, peeked in the doorway, and saw twenty-four students
sitting dead silent in two long rows of fiberglass chairs. . . . They
were waiting for the teacher to arrive and do education to them.27

He comments that they responded with “aggressive silence.”28 This

“Siberian Syndrome . . . is a defensive reaction to the unequal power relations
of schooling.”29
While Shor focuses on the oppressive routines of schooling that lead to
such pervasive silences, Brady, Johnson, and Tobin explore their own complic-
ity in their students’ silences by rereading their experiences within each narra-
tive. Although silence is still, ultimately the sign of a problem in the classroom,
these authors consider their own responsibility in creating these troubling dy-
namics. And self-critically, they investigate how their worldviews shape their
readings of their students and themselves. The process of narration denatural-
izes the events for both writers and readers as the perceived resistances and hos-
tilities are reconsidered. It becomes clear that these narrative accounts are
constructions, not simply the truth of the experiences, pointing out that they
are “an incomplete and an interested account of whatever is envisioned.”30 In this
process, we are asked to consider “the ordinarily tacit body of constructs (be-
liefs, metaphors, images, strategies, values, and the like) that inform practice”31:
why do we read these silences as blameworthy resistance and hostility?
Part of the answer to this question lies in the value of speaking and si-
lence in American culture. In this context, it is perhaps unsurprising that teach-
ers pay such profound attention to the audible voices of our students, given the
larger cultural understandings of the privilege and right to speak for oneself. In
the history of the United States, freedom and speaking have been inextricably
linked, even within the text of Declaration of Independence, which “declare[s]
the causes which impel them to the separation.” That is, it is not enough to be
free and independent states, they “must publish and declare” this fact.32
The history of the United States reminds us that to have a voice, to be
able to speak for oneself, is to have power. From Revolutionary War slogans
about “taxation without representation,” to the frequently invoked First
Amendment right to free speech, to the suffrage movement and civil rights ac-
tivism, and to voter registration drives in 2004 that instructed young voters
“your vote is your voice,”33 we are reminded of the power of speaking out as a
means of self-definition in a democracy. As bell hooks argues,

Moving from silence to speech [i]s a revolutionary gesture. Once

again, the idea of finding one’s voice or having a voice assumes
a primacy in talk, discourse, writing, and action. . . . Speaking
32 » between speaking and silence

becomes both a way to engage in active self-transformation

and a right of passage where one moves from being object to being
subject. Only as subjects can we speak. As objects we remain
voiceless—our beings defined and interpreted by others.34

Likewise, the justice system of the United States relies on the individual
citizen’s right to speak. The accused have the right to tell their own version of
their stories, to defend themselves against the charges against them. This is bal-
anced by the awareness that speaking can be dangerous; as the Miranda warn-
ings instruct, one’s words can become the weapons of one’s own incrimination.
Furthermore, I would argue that for many of us educated in American
schools, a curious inverse of the axiom actions speak louder than words is lodged in
our collective subconscious. Public speeches have come to be a means of under-
standing history: the Gettysburg Address, Martin Luther King’s “I have a dream”
speech, and John F. Kennedy’s inaugural address have become a shorthand for cap-
turing and reducing complex historical realities. In this way, speaking has emerged
as symbolic action. This is enacted in our daily lives through communal prayer,
in reciting the Pledge of Allegiance, and in swearing an oath in court: speaking is
the means by which one’s presence and participation are declared. To choose not
to speak—in a classroom or elsewhere—is to symbolically reject one’s legacy in a
democracy, one’s right to self-definition, and one’s ability to act as a subject.

A Teacher’s Silence as Power

Right after, he’ll have read a passage or we’ll have watched a really
moving movie, everyone just kind of sits and thinks about it for little
while. And the teacher never gets on our case to start talking right then.
Because I think it’s just kind of understood that we’re thinking and gath-
ering our thoughts.
—Catarina, student

The value of silence radically changes when it is initiated and controlled

by the teacher. Several teaching narratives celebrate the productiveness marked
by the silence initiated by a teacher:

The room is quiet except for the scrape of pen tips on paper. . . . I
know the drama of this story, [Chopin’s “The Story of An Hour”]
and I don’t want the outside noise to break the spell. . . . The class
reads and writes in virtual silence.35

On day 2, I note the wonderful silence (“there are sounds of people

reading!”).36
 Considering the Problem of Silence « 33

[After a particularly charged reading] there is silence. Charged,

glorious silence. I let the class feel that power for a few seconds.37

People pick up their pens. The concentrated quiet in the room tells
me that everyone is writing and the writing matters.38

Joseph Trimmer’s celebration of the power of silence explores how his

teacherly voice fills the gaps and silences in his classroom. His students “know”
this pattern; they expect “teacher-talk” from him. After an unusually heated ex-
change with a student who has challenged his choice of texts and the interpre-
tations offered, Trimmer refuses to fill that space. He “savor[s] the silence.”39
But the ultimate expression of this power to control silence comes in Toby Ful-
weiler’s narrative “Telling Stories and Writing Truths,” in which he explores his
practice of conducting the first day of a seminar entirely in silence.
These representations, all centered on the active “engaged” student, reflect
an ideology of learning-by-doing. Such classrooms are not structured around
the lecturing voice of a teacher; rather, it is the activity and interaction of stu-
dents that constitute “knowledge.” It is important, though, to note that such
“student-centeredness” does not include consulting with students about their
perceptions of classroom dialogue and silence. In these representations, teacher-
narrators do not question their authority or the legitimacy of that institution-
ally sanctioned authority to evoke the voices of students or to silence them.
In these instances, silence prompted by the teacher represents the smooth
functioning of pedagogy. Passante’s image of “charged, glorious silence” seems
to underlie all of these representations in which what happens in silence mat-
ters. These two meanings of silence—as resistance and as the expression of
powerful intellectual work—often exist within the same text (i.e., Trimmer,
Moran, Perl, and Passante).
I believe that silence occupies a central place in our collective imagination
because it is a virtually “dataless” phenomenon and because it is an ambiguous
symbol dependent on context for interpretation. Those cues we use to interpret
speech—inflection, pause, emphasis, volume, tone—are absent, thus the lis-
tener is often left to rely on the feeling of silence and his culturally constructed
expectations to create both the text and the interpretation of silence. The lis-
tener is allowed to make of silence what he will, based on the context: the rela-
tionship of the participants, their location, the occasion, and a host of other
factors, including his own history. The silence of a suspect being interrogated
might certainly indicate guilt. This silence is unlikely to be confused with that
of new parents staring at a newborn in a nursery, that of a young widow in a fu-
neral home, or that of a priest kneeling at an altar. But are such silences unam-
biguous? Guilt, awe, grief, and meditation seem likely interpretations, but aren’t
language-barriers, fear, relief, and shame equally plausible? The silences in our
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