‘It’s just semantics?’: investigating a school district’s decision to respect or value diversity

Abstract

Value diversity and promote understanding—so read a heading in a school district’s strategic plan. The phrase was to initiate six months of controversial community debate that was eventually encapsulated into the single question: Should our schools respect or should they value diversity? This question polarized the community, ultimately shaping the final outcome of the debate. Such localized deliberations reflect and reconstruct societal discourses about diversity and democracy, ultimately influencing educational policy decisions and schooling practices. Understanding how participants navigate these discourses is crucial for formulating more inclusive educational policy and for transforming societal discourses about democracy and difference. In this essay, it is argued that two discursive practices limited the democratic potential of the Boulder, Colorado school district’s debate and undermined the transformation of dominant discourses about diversity. It is suggested that these two linguistic tools appear frequently in public deliberation and identify implications for developing educational policy around diversity and for retheorizing the relationship between difference and democracy.

Notes

Western Washington University, Secondary Education MS 9090, Bellingham, WA, 98225, USA. Email: [email protected]

For the purposes of this essay, I shall use the term conservative to refer to the group who wished to maintain the status quo by (1) not adding sexual orientation to the definition of diversity and (2) by opposing the use of the phrase value diversity (especially if sexual orientation was incorporated in the definition of diversity). I will use the term progressive to refer to the group who wished to alter current district policy by (1) adding sexual orientation to the definition of diversity and by (2) using the term value diversity. I am using conservative and progressive in this way in keeping with the traditional use of conservative as a label for positions that uphold the status quo and also to remain consistent with the critical literature I cite, which labels as conservative positions that oppose civil rights based on sexual orientation (e.g. Clark, 1995; Collins, 1995; Douglas, 1995).

Of course, a number of factors can contribute to dismissal of these remarks. However, several theorists have noted that procedural norms in public deliberation frequently stifle particular perspectives (Ryan, 1990; Fraser, 1995). As such, contesting the very norms by which we conduct deliberation is crucial (Benhabib, 1996; Asen, 1999). In this case, several norms made challenges to the behavior–belief dichotomy difficult to sustain. For example, during board member discussions, each member speaks for a lengthy time on a number of issues. As such, the remarks above were always embedded in long, sometimes unrelated comments, making them difficult for the next speaker to access directly. Likewise, during this discussion segment, each board member often presents his/her comments as a singular speech disconnected from previous remarks. Unlike everyday conversation, the members do not respond directly to the previous speaker nor do they necessarily pick up where the last speaker ended. With each of the above quotes, the board members who followed these comments diverted attention from them by making their initial remarks about different points, returning later to the more controversial topic. Third, if a point is not addressed by the next speaker, one usually does not interrupt to say, ‘I want to hear your answer to this.’ The norms of public decorum characterize such behavior as rude or inappropriate. Finally, public participation comments are limited to 2–5‐minute isolated speeches, immediately followed by the next speaker. This format makes it difficult to meaningfully engage public speakers’ remarks. Thus, these procedural norms may have presented significant barriers to challenging the distinction between behavior and belief. Contesting these specific practices, common in public deliberation, may then be a crucial step in making these challenges stick.

In addition, the closing comment in this meeting potentially reinforced both the unifying and silencing functions of the ‘just semantics’ frame. After the vote, the president, who sided with the progressives, thanked everyone and observed that ‘these are not easy issues and this is democracy in action to see us struggling to, to agree.’ The assertion that ‘this is democracy in action’ potentially complemented the unifying function of the ‘just semantics’ frame by reassuring everyone that they had come to this decision together. However, deliberative processes are not democratic simply because we say so. Theorists have noted the ways in which such statements can mask the fact that democracy is, in fact, a process not an arrived state, and that some current deliberative processes may be quite undemocratic (Spring, 1996; Bloom, 1998). Invocations of ‘this is democracy in action’ can allow everyone to feel as though they have arrived at a decision together, but it also discourages consideration of whether or not they truly have, thereby silencing those who may have not been adequately heard. In this case, many procedural norms could have been contested, some of which I have identified briefly in the analysis of the behavior–belief dichotomy. Thus, claiming this is ‘democracy in action,’ combined with the frame that the debate is ‘just semantics,’ may have served as a clever way to end discussion early while simultaneously pacifying the minority they were about to vote down.

For an example of how this might look consider how one student used a similar strategy to challenge the way a trial was framed in a social studies class in Weis, and Fine (2001).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Catherine Ashcraft

Western Washington University, Secondary Education MS 9090, Bellingham, WA, 98225, USA. Email: [email protected]