Foundations for DS1 – 07.06.2018

This is a reading response for Friday, July 6, 2018.

Topic: Historical / Philosophical / Theoretical Foundations of Social Justice Education

Student Voice: From Picnic to Dining Room

Power and its impact on student voice is a social justice issue. Social justice education, Giroux argues, is a “pedagogy that is attentive to the histories, dreams, and experiences that … students bring to school” (Ellsworth, 1989, p. 306). Education can perpetuate cultural hegemony by silencing student voice or it can be a force for emancipation, and an opportunity to not only listen, but hear the silenced voices (Delpit, 1998). By acknowledging authoritarianism, naming inequalities, and recognizing power differentials in the classroom (Ellsworth, 1989; Delpit, 1998), educators and social science researchers can become gateways to break down cultural hegemony that silences student voice.

Ellsworth (1989) and Delpit (1998) posit that hearing, not just listening to students, requires a safe space with a commitment to trust, sharing, and the end of oppression (Delpit, 1998). Educators can actively negotiate to privilege voices (Fine, 1994).  By establishing educational spaces that teach explicit and implicit skills and processes of language, communication, and presentation (Delpit, 1998), educators can expose pluralities, partialities, and identities (Fine, 1994). When educators “excavate voices of privilege to understand how Othering works” (Fine, p. 78) and teach the rules and forms to succeed (Delpit, 1998), they can engage in authentic dialogue with multiple voices. It’s a process of recognizing the binaries and boundaries, the ‘hyphen’ between self – other while actively looking for what is or is not happening in  classroom discussions (Fine, 1994). It’s an opportunity for teachers to engage in conversations with students who’s “dialogue has been silenced” (Delpit, p.281).

Ellsworth (1989) contends that student voice is a myth. In today’s educational environments in Ontario, student voice is supported and actively encouraged. Yet Ellsworth cautions that student voice is problematic since it “loses sight of the contradictory and partial nature of all voices” (p. 312). Ellsworth argues that educators make assumptions about those who do or do not participate in classrooms, those ‘lost voices’ (Ellsworth, p. 312) and the voiceless ‘others’. One challenging implication is that students “are not talking in their authentic voices or they are declining/refusing to talk at all” (Ellsworth, p. 313). I suggest that this is correlated to “the result of conscious and unconscious assessments of the power relations and safety of the situation” (Ellsworth p. 313) at any given moment in time.

In order to explicitly teach students about language within power structures Delpit (1998) uses the metaphor of moving between a picnic (heritage patterns) and a formal dining room (formal patterns). Educators need to be “unafraid to raise questions about discrimination and voicelessness” (p. 297) and to truly hear, not just listen, for the “silenced dialogues” Delpit (1998) by naming and addressing inequalities while “constructing alternative ground rules for communication” (Ellseworth, p. 317). Ellseworth (1998) suggests creating affinity groups as a mechanism to work against oppression (Ellseworth, 1989). As we come to the picnic or dining room, Fine (1994) suggests we accept that “everyone is someone else’s Other” so that together we can confront the “grey areas which we all have in us” (p. 322).

References

10 Minute Philosophy. (2015, December 27). Hegemony – 10 minute philosophy – terms. Retrieved from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=js8E6C3ZnJ0 

Delpit, L. (1998). Silenced Dialogue: Power and Pedagogy in Educating Other People’s Children. Harvard Educational Review 58(3), 280–298.

Ellsworth, E. (1989). Why doesn’t this feel empowering? Working through the repressive myths of critical pedagogy. Harvard educational review, 59(3), 297-325.

Fine, M. (1994). Working the hyphens: Re-inventing Self and Other in Qualitative Research. In Denzin & Lincoln (Eds.), Handbook of qualitative research. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage.

Image attribution: Photo by Gabriel Jimenez on Unsplash