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Between Speaking and Silence
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Between Speaking and Silence
A Study of Quiet Students
Mary M. Reda
Published by State University of New York Press, Albany
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
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
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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
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:
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
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
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