Navigating the “Danger Zone”: Tone Policing and the Bounding of Civility in the Practice of Student Voice

Biddle, Catharine; Hufnagel, Elizabeth

doi:10.1086/704097

Cited by 13 publications

(13 citation statements)

References 39 publications

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“…Finally, despite structural and relational commitments to equity, students' emphasis on certain skills also led to exclusionary practices. Students sometimes engaged in self-policing by viewing participation in certain skill-development organizations, such as high school debate and speech, as desirable prerequisites for participation (Biddle & Hufnagel, 2019;Conner et al, 2016). Unlike other studies of student voice groups seeking to influence state-level education policy, SVT and OSV sought to move beyond direct action, such as events and protests, to meetings with committees, policymakers, and interest groups in order to advance a proactive policy agenda (Conner & Rosen, 2015;Conner et al, 2013).…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“Not Present in Our Ranks”: Exploring Equitable Representation in Student Voice Efforts for Policy Change

Holquist

Walls

2021

Teachers College Record

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Background/Context: Increasingly, K–12 students are seeking to influence educational policies that directly affect their lives. As student intervention in policy increases, it is important to understand the composition of these groups and how they seek to exercise power and influence over policymakers. Purpose: This study sought to examine how two state-level student voice groups for policy change sought equitable representation in their composition. As student voice groups expand beyond school, city, or district level groups to focus on state- and national-level advocacy, the character of their composition takes on additional importance as they claim to speak on behalf of larger numbers of students. Setting: This study draws on interview, document analysis, and observation data from two student voice groups working to influence state-level legislative action on K–12 educational policy. Research Design: We combine secondary data analysis of data from state-level student voice groups with elements of duoethnography to explore how participants thought about, strived for, and fell short of equitable intra- group representation. Findings: We found that the members of both groups were personally committed to equity both in terms of group composition and advocacy. Additionally, group members had structures and policies—such as remote access and low barriers to entry—that encourage equitable representation. Participants reported a relational climate of inclusion. Despite these assets, outcomes were mixed: the groups successfully achieved racial and ethnic proportionality with the state, but remained predominantly urban and able- bodied in their composition. Conclusion: Despite the groups’ best efforts, group members’ challenges with distributed recruitment and emphasis on certain skills such as public speaking limited equitable outcomes in representation. This research makes clear that who is involved in the group at the outset and their network will shape representation. It also indicates that although technology can lower barriers to entry, it is not a panacea. Finally, this research reinforces the notion that students engage in self-policing of the group in order to gain greater legitimacy in the eyes of policymakers.

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Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“Not Present in Our Ranks”: Exploring Equitable Representation in Student Voice Efforts for Policy Change

Holquist

Walls

2021

Teachers College Record

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“…Social groups can also support White supremacy through policies or plans that bolster Whiteness as superior, also known as strategies, as well as tactics or ways of enacting strategies that uphold Whiteness as superior over other groupings. Strategies can include rewriting memory or history or cultural appropriation as well as tactics like stimulating conflicts among subordinate groups and tone policing, meaning one focuses on the tone and not the content of what is being said (Biddle & Hufnagel, 2019;Curtin et al, 2016;Nuru & Arendt, 2019;Quinones, 2017), White tears (Hikido & Murray, 2016;Patton & Jordan, 2017;Phipps, 2021;Tate & Page, 2018), and status maneuvering (Oselin & Barber, 2019). Several scholars have written about many of the strategies and tactics used in oppressive contexts (Pewewardy, 2003;Smith et al, 2021).…”

Section: Structures That Support Oppressionmentioning

confidence: 99%

If Anti-Racism Is the Goal, Then Anti-Oppression Is How We Get There

Smith

Aguilar

Kozu³

et al. 2022

ASW

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Many schools of social work around the United States of America wrote anti-racism statements because of the recent murders of Black and Brown people. In this contribution, the authors describe a challenging and tense discussion of racism and anti-racism leading to a group process about oppression and anti-oppression in the social work profession. For some, the urgency to address racism led to tactics and strategies that got in the way of social workers engaging in anti-oppressive practices. While the structure of higher education often reinforces traditional hierarchies of power, the profession of social work calls us to promote our core values of social justice, integrity, and the importance of human relationships as we strive for an anti-oppressive future. Consequently, social work faculty may experience role conflict as we navigate these tensions. We believe it is important to harness and process such discomfort as we critically examine the power dynamics within our own department, and our own profession. This voluntary, ad hoc group, composed of a diverse group of faculty members, provides space for ongoing mutual aid, consciousness raising, appropriate discomfort, and accountability. If anti-racism is the goal, then anti-oppression is how we get there.

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“…Another issue which our study did not permit us to explore is why student voice is resisted by some teachers, and the complex affective intrapersonal dynamics at work in schools when students ‘have a voice’. Teacher resistance may be, as Biddle and Hufnagel (2019, p. 490) suggest, a response to ‘the often implicit political challenges of allowing students to express their voices within the context of traditionally hierarchical school structures’. It may be that teachers hold ‘unspoken “emotional” investments in unexamined ideological beliefs’ (Boler, 1999, p. xvii)—including deficit conceptions of the capacities of the children and young people whom they teach (Gillett‐Swan & Sargeant, 2019).…”

Section: The Affective Politics Of Student Voicementioning

confidence: 99%

“…These affirmative emotions are not the only ones that have been analysed in student voice research; it is well known that the enactment of student voice may not always ‘feel empowering’ (Ellsworth, 1992). As Biddle and Hufnagel (2019, p. 488) note, growing up ‘is a time in which young people engage in vocal critiques of power and their social world […] and voicing their experiences can be emotional work’. This may especially be the case where students have to navigate the ‘culture of silence’ (Baroutsis et al , 2016, p. 438) which persists within schooling, where students’ voices remain constrained by educators’ expectations (McCluskey et al , 2013), or where they are employed chiefly for institutional or systemic purposes that have little to do with students’ priorities (Charteris & Smardon, 2019c).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Students may equally feel nervous or intimidated about voicing their views to teachers (Bahou, 2012; Groundwater‐Smith et al , 2014). Biddle and Hufnagel (2019, p. 503) describe students’ ‘fear and anxiety about the messiness of managing adults’ emotional reactions to any data on their teaching from students’, and of ‘having to be the messenger of student dissatisfaction’. In their study, students and their adult advisors decided to ‘tone police’ other students’ emotionally charged views, ‘out of concern for the teachers’ feelings’ and to maintain institutional support (Biddle and Hufnagel, 2019, p. 514).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Feeling voice: The emotional politics of ‘student voice’ for teachers

Black

Mayes

2020

British Educational Res J

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In recent years, student voice has become a popular school reform strategy, with the promise of generating relations of trust, respect, belonging and student empowerment. However, when student voice practices are taken up by schools, student voice may also be associated with less affirmative feelings: it is often accounted for in terms of teacher 'fear', 'resistance' or 'uncertainty' about altered power relations. Such explanations risk individualising and pathologising teachers' responses, rather than recognising the complexities of the institutional conditions of student voice. This article considers the affective politics of student voice: that is, the contestations that attend who gets to name how student voice feels in schools. Working with data from an evaluation study of three Australian primary schools who engage in 'exemplary' student voice practices, we listen to school leaders and facilitating teachers' accounts about the responses of other teachers at their schools to student voice. Parallels are drawn between the construction of some teachers as reluctant, and previous analyses of 'silenced' student voices in schools. We argue that, in order to analyse the enactment of student voice in more nuanced tones, it is necessary to consider the profoundly emotional experience of teaching and learning, the ambivalences of teachers' experiences of student voice and contemporary reconstitutions of teacher subjectivities.

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Navigating the “Danger Zone”: Tone Policing and the Bounding of Civility in the Practice of Student Voice

Cited by 13 publications

References 39 publications

“Not Present in Our Ranks”: Exploring Equitable Representation in Student Voice Efforts for Policy Change

“Not Present in Our Ranks”: Exploring Equitable Representation in Student Voice Efforts for Policy Change

If Anti-Racism Is the Goal, Then Anti-Oppression Is How We Get There

Feeling voice: The emotional politics of ‘student voice’ for teachers

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