This is about invitations. Invitations to how we hold space for student identities (plural), intersectionalities, developmental stages, and imagined trajectories. I’d like to invite educators to reframe silence as a sign of difficulty with course material.
When teachers invite students to verbally participate in classroom interactions, student silence is most often assumed to indicate disengagement or a failure to participate.
(Schultz, 2009, p. 11)
Imagine visiting a new planet and you’re in your first class for interplanetary collaborations. The journey to the planet was a little unsettling. You had to get used to zero gravity, among other things. Your classmates from across the galaxy seem to be doing just fine (at least that’s what it looks like to you). The orientation classes have started, and your audio translator from your instructor’s guidelines sounds like there’s a bit of static, but you can make it out. Then comes the directive, “please share your …”
And then you wonder, is your tech working as it should? Is your translator driver up to date? What if your response is too elementary? What if it’s just plain wrong? Maybe you need to hear a few responses to get into expressing yours. But what if someone says exactly what you have? Is that even possible? Maybe you should go first?
Before a student is comfortable enough to feel ready to contribute, these intrusive thoughts are just the surface. And they don’t necessarily mean that there’s difficulty with the task per se or that there’s disengagement. Student silence is an easy target for profiling student behaviour. I’d like to challenge instructors to consider that there may be a range of actions occurring within silence and invite them to rethink their instinctive response to decide what silences mean.
Inspirations
Schultz, K. (2009). Rethinking classroom participation: Listening to silent voices. New York, NY: Teachers College Press.
Galicia S. T. Blackman 