Silencing in Classroom Interaction: Producing and Relating Social Spaces

Abstract

Researchers have studied silencing practices in a number of ways, including focusing on turn taking and temporal dynamics, documenting specific interactional strategies, and analyzing the types of discourses expelled from a given context. The article forwards an alternate approach, arguing that silencing is an interactional achievement that involves producing, dividing, and relating social spaces such that participants are positioned as more or less privileged or silenced. In the production of social space for silencing, I argue that 2 key processes are active: narrating social "scenes" through talk and producing embodied spaces. The production of social space in the service of silencing is traced diachronically (as a joint, dialogic accomplishment over time) and synchronically (as the articulation of multiple social spaces in a single moment). The argument is developed from an analysis of a segment of interaction concerning women's rights within a high school history classroom, in which a girl is silenced by a group of boys. Methodologically, the article also develops alternate means of representing silencing within interaction, including maps of embodied spaces and an initial means of transcribing the shifting and nuanced participation status of a silenced participant.