The Dilemma of Voice in ClassroomsThe three categories of Jackson et al.’s (1993) framework that I have examined convey some of the richness and complexity of the moral dimensions of classroom interaction, but they by no means exhaust the possibilities for morally significant events and exchanges in classes. Many other areas of classroom discourse can be shown to have a moral substrate. As a single example, I look briefly at the moral dilemma of voice in the language classroom (Bailey & Nunan, 1996; Jaworski, 1992; McElroy-Johnson, 1993; Tsui, 1996). As before, I ground this discussion in a piece of classroom data. This time the data come from a second study my colleagues and I conducted in the spring of 2000 (B.Johnston, Ruiz, & Juhász, 2002). In this study, we took a more detailed look at a single classroom, that of Mary, a highly experienced teacher and many-year veteran of the same IEP, whose upper intermediate class was entitled “Communication” and was primarily intended to provide opportunities for spoken practice. In the following extract, from the penultimate week of the 7-week session, Mary is negotiating with her students which topic from the book they would rather look at next: sleep, or abnormal psychology. It focuses on Young, a Korean student and the only woman in the group.
Teacher: Can [Turkish name], I think is going with Abnormality. [Laughs; looks around and waits for answers or suggestions. Nobody says anything for a few seconds.] Yasuo, which would you prefer to talk about, abnormal behavior or sleep?
Yasuo: Abnormal behavior.
Teacher: Abnormal behavior. Young? [Young doesn’t look up, avoiding eye contact; she looks at her book. There is silence for 12 seconds.] If you had a choice, which would you talk about, sleep or abnormal behavior? [Waits for 3 seconds; there is no answer from Young. She turns to the next student] Diego?
Diego: Sleep.
Teacher: Sleep. Okay, you know where you stand. Marcio?
(class of 2/17/00; B.Johnston, Ruiz, & Juhász, 2002)
Young was a shy and quiet Korean woman in a small group dominated by talkative men from countries such as Turkey, the United Arab Emirates, Brazil, and Argentina. In most of the classes we observed, Young managed to say something, but usually it seemed to be an effort for her. In this class, for whatever reason, she failed to respond to Mary’s prompting and extended wait time, to the point where Mary moved on to the next student without a contribution from Young.
We can only speculate on the reasons for Young’s silence at this time, and on her thoughts and feelings as she waited out what must have seemed a terribly long 12 seconds of silence in an otherwise noisy class. These are important matters, too. However, since my focus in this chapter, as in the book in general, is on the teacher, I wish to consider for a moment the moral dilemma faced by Mary. It seems to me that at this point in the class Mary is caught between two opposing sets of values regarding voice in the language classroom. On the one hand, there is respect for a student’s right to be silent and for the very human difficulty of shyness; this, in turn, springs from our more general concern that each student feel comfortable and stress-free in class. Protecting students from stress is a general response aimed at the well-being of the student, coming from our care for the student in our role in the teacher-student relation; it is also a more purely educational value, since many teachers (myself included) believe that stress, at least too much of the wrong kind, is counterproductive—a belief expressed in Krashen’s (1981) notion of the affective filter. Last, allowing the student to remain silent also conveys respect for the student’s right to choose when she does or does not have something to say—that is, it acknowledges her agency and empowerment in the matter of voice. On the other hand, however, powerful values move the teacher to do her utmost to get Young to say something. Balancing the student’s right to silence is her right to voice: the right for her opinion to be heard and to count in the collective of the class. In this understanding, “silence” is a negative value, associated with the notion of “silencing” and “being silenced” (Delpit, 1995; McLaughlin & Tierney, 1993; Weis & Fine, 1993). In light of this value, Mary attempts to bring Young into the community of the class as a fully fledged member, with all the rights this brings, including the right to participate in the negotiation of the syllabus (Breen, 1984; Irujo, 2000). In addition, there is a good educational reason to encourage Young to speak: As mentioned earlier, we know from both research and our own experience that producing language significantly enhances acquisition—that, in the words of the Spanish proverb, “we make the road by walking.”1 For this reason too Mary encourages Young to speak. I believe the dilemma just outlined underlies any attempt by a teacher to draw speech from reluctant students. No two students are alike; each brings a different level and kind of anxiety or shyness to class. Some students talk far too much, silencing others. Yet in each case, and at each moment of the class, the teacher must weigh the competing values of voluntary silence versus enforced speech in deciding what is in the best interests of the learner concerned and the best interests of the other learners in the class. In each case, this will be a moral decision regarding what is good and right for the students.
