This review of research examines classroom conversations about race with a theoretical framing oriented to understanding how such conversations may disrupt social and educational inequalities. The review covers research on how classroom conversations on race contribute to students’ and educators’ understandings of a racialized society, their construction of and reflection on relationships among students, as well as to their learning of academic content knowledge. The review considers research across grades P–12, as well as conversations in teacher education, with a specific focus on the U.S. context. Limiting the review to the U.S. context is done not to obfuscate conceptions of race and inequalities globally, but to elucidate how race becomes manifested in unique ways in the United States—often positioning African Americans and Blackness as the “fundamental other.” The review offers a social, historical, and political discussion that contextualizes how classroom conversations, and their omission, are not conversations only relegated to the classroom, but are part of a larger dialogue within the broader society.
This paper describes a telling case account that occurred during an ethnographic study in the United States in a secondary school senior British Literature class with only two African American young women, Pam and Natonya. The telling case complicated silence and also made visible other reflexive processes that provided opportunities to unpack and theorize silence, which led to the articulation of the silence trilogy. Further, it also made visible how the African American woman scholar’s own lived experiences informed her attempt to make sense of how Pam and Natonya navigated the silence(s). This paper will primarily foreground the works of Scholars of Color and use Black feminist and sociolinguistic theory to explore the following question: How did two African-American females in a predominately white educational space negotiate the silence(s) (e.g., silence, silencing, and silenced)? How did the African American woman researchers of color make sense of their negotiation?
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