Unmuted: The racial politics of silent classrooms

Abstract

Instructional resources often assume that students learn best when they have access to a quiet environment. This article interrogates silence’s presumed objectivity and innocuousness as the sonic backdrop for schooling. I argue that norms and expectations around silence in schools in the United States (US) inscribe a sonic color line. Such standards codify white, middle-class ways of sounding as an indicator of rationality. Simultaneously, they construct other ways of being sonically, particularly those traditionally associated with Black cultural norms, as generally unfit for school. The sanctioning of silent comportment in schools likely affects the academic achievement and sense of belonging of students whose sonic cultures differ from the schools’. I illustrate my argument with examples from classroom management resources published between 2001 and 2021. While silence’s role in constructing raced, gendered, and classed subjectivities prevails across school subjects, I focus specifically on materials for music educators. This school subject emphasizes sound production and reception, which makes its resources particularly explicit about sound management. I conducted a close reading of the materials informed by Foucault’s (1980, 1978/1991) approach to the analysis of discourses, paying close attention to how silence-related norms and expectations shape students’ academic and ontological horizons. By mapping out silence’s role in producing a racial color line, this article underscores the central role that anti-Blackness continues to play in US schools nearly 70 years after school segregation was ruled unconstitutional.

Keywords:

• Anti-Blackness
• classroom management
• critical analysis of discourses
• discipline
• music education
• silence

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1 To conceptualize the sonic color line, Stoever built on Weheliye’s (2005) treatment of Du Bois’s (1940/2007b) color line as an audiovisual entity.

2 The expression education debt underscores the past and present systems that produce the so-called achievement gap.

3 While analytical listening is a routine part of most music teacher programs, the role that sociocultural meanings and structural power play in music teaching and learning is only starting to become a part of those programs (e.g., Hess, 2018).

4 Following scholars like Michel Foucault, Judith Butler, Ann Laura Stoler, and Joan Scott, I conceptualize the body as a historicized materiality with socio-historically constructed racial and sensory attributes.

5 This article dialogues with Black Critical Theory (or BlackCrit) scholarship, which aims to capture what Wynter (1989) has called the specificity of the Black. It does not attempt to generalize its insights to all racially minoritized subjects.

6 Most studies use isolated cognitive tasks like silent reading as their intervention. The concept of what constitutes a cognitive task is itself socio-culturally situated (Carozzi, 2005).

7 However, participatory-interactive communication styles in the US are not exclusive to Black communities. For example, Tannen (1994) has highlighted a similar communication pattern known as communicative overlapping among the Jewish community of New York. Moreover, Schwarz and Baker (2017) have described the chavruta-style learning in yeshivas and kollels (traditional Jewish schools) as “loud and animated” (p. 39).

8 Students who engage in participatory-interactive communication may also use African American Vernacular English or other non-dominant varieties of English, further complicating how their (white, female, middle-class) teachers misinterpret their contributions (Young & Martinez, 2011).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Antía González Ben

Antía González Ben (PhD, Wisconsin-Madison) is Assistant Professor of Music Education at the University of Toronto Faculty of Music. Her research areas include music education philosophies, curriculum theory, education policy, and sound studies. González Ben’s scholarship examines the politics of diversity in music education: How music education establishes realms of normalcy and possibility that simultaneously cast certain pedagogical objects and subjects as “problems.” She is a native of Galicia, Spain. She lives in Toronto, traditional land of the Anishinabek, the Haudenosaunee, the Wendat, and the Mississaugas of the Credit.