Which of my students are being trained into silence — and am I one of the teachers training them?
Why the question matters
I found my own voice after fifty, against a family structure that socialized women to cook and to listen. If that training took me half a lifetime to unlearn, I need to know whether my classroom quietly repeats it for the girls — and especially the girls of the global majority — sitting in front of me.
What I currently think
Silence gets mistaken for compliance, respect, even contentment. But Dorothy Roberts warns it can also be chosen resistance, so I cannot simply read quiet as harm. The honest question is double: who is being silenced, and who is choosing silence — and can I even tell the difference from the front of the room? This may become a strand of the dissertation self-study: tracking who speaks, who is called on, who is praised for listening.
What I am reading & learning
- —bell hooks, Talking Back
- —Belenky et al., Women's Ways of Knowing
- —Carol Gilligan, In a Different Voice
- —Tillie Olsen, Silences
- —Dorothy Roberts, The Paradox of Silence
Related journal entries
- Finding my voice after fifty
Women have been socialized to cook and to listen for millennia. That was the family structure I grew up in. I did not find my voice until after forty — really after fifty — and it was not easy.