August 3, 2005
Weis, Lois and Michelle Fine, eds. Beyond Silenced Voices: Class, Race, and Gender in United States Schools. New York: State University of New York Press, 1993.
Beyond Silenced Voices is a compilation of articles focusing on institutionalized silencing in public schools. Divided into two parts, Weis and Fine’s collection begins with a series of studies that analyze the ways marginalized voices are systematically silenced according to race, gender, and class affiliations. These pieces are each concerned with the ways certain voices are silenced by both implicit and explicit institutional structures imbedded in the public school system, as well as the way in which these silences are sustained and naturalized by the institution. In the second part of the book, writers attempt to listen to these institutionally silenced voices by incorporating individual testimonials into the articles. It is only by hearing and centering these “once marginalized” voices, Fine and Weis argue in their Introduction, that we can move “‘beyond silenced voices’” and “understand and interrupt the perversions and pleasures of power, privilege, and marginalization in public schooling” (2).
The first part of the book, “Structuring Silence: Policies and Practice,” includes six articles that each address various instances of institutionalized educational inequality. In “Breaking through the Barriers: African American Job Candidates and the Academic Hiring Process,” Roslyn Arlin Mickelson, Stephen Samuel Smith, and Melvin L. Oliver detect “elitist not meritocratic” (24) tendencies in the academic hiring process, indicating that the “structural barriers” underlying the wider occupational structure also impacts academia (21). Mara Sapon-Shevin critiques the rhetoric supporting and the elitist assumptions underlying “gifted education” in her “Gifted Education and the Protection of Privilege: Breaking the Silence, Opening the Discourse.” Walter Haney’s “Testing and Minorities” is an examination of standardized testing and an argument that such tests place “racial, ethnic, and language minorities” at a disadvantage (45). Michelle Fine writes in “Sexuality, Schooling, and Adolescent Females: The Missing Discourse of Desire” that instead of acknowledging female desire, sex education remains “anti-sex,” perpetuating a discourse of female victimization and producing powerless female subjects (98). In “Empowering Minority Students: A Framework for Intervention,” Jim Cummins links educational progress to broader societal relations, and offers the example of the Spanish-only preschool program of the Carpenteria, California School District in order to argue that language-minorities stand a better chance of succeeding academically if their home language is validated by the educational institution. Noting the “fallacious” dichotomy between skills and process views of education, Lisa D. Delpit endorses an ethnographic, cross-cultural communication, and personal experience-validating approach to instruction in her “The Silenced Dialogue: Power and Pedagogy in Educating Other People’s Children” (138).
The ten articles organized in the second half of the collection seek to locate voices within silence by moving “From the Margins to the Center: Beyond Silenced Voices.” Carol Gilligan listens to adolescent girls in “Psychology, Politics, Girls, and Women,” observes that the disappearance of these young women’s political resistance coincides with their physical and psychic development into adult female and feminized subjects, and writes that a political revival is possible only if those voices learn to continue speaking to one another. Teenage romance fiction, Linda K. Christian-Smith writes in “Voices of Resistance: Young Women Readers of Romance Fiction,” constructs the adolescent female readers’ “gender, class, racial, age, and sexual identities in complex ways,” by prompting those readers to both encounter as well as renegotiate stereotypical social relations (187). In “Disruptions: Improper Masculinities and Schooling,” R.W. Connell critiques the notion of a monolithic “masculinity” and calls for an “educational politics of masculinity” that would engage with feminism to fight the effects of patriarchy and would be more interdisciplinary and widespread than current university-level gender studies courses (205). Acknowledging in his article “Choices, Not Closets: Heterosexism and Homophobia in Schools” that “differences in race, social class, ethnicity, and sexual orientation do have important bearing on academic achievement and future success” (234), Richard A. Friend focuses on institutionally silenced lesbian, gay and bisexual voices in particular, calling for a disruption of the “layers of silencing” (235). Lois Weis’ article, “White Male Working-Class Youth: An Exploration of Relative Privilege and Loss,” examines the emergence of antifeminism and racism in a young generation of frustrated white working-class males susceptible to the secular New Right social movement. Robert B. Stevenson and Jeanne Ellsworth study “Dropouts and the Silencing of Critical Voices” by listening to white working-class dropout students’ silenced critiques of schooling, concluding that “in contrast to urban minority dropouts, white working-class dropouts have internalized the image of personal deficiency and silenced themselves in voicing criticisms of the school” (260). Michele Foster’s “Resisting Racism: Personal Testimonies of African-American Teachers” incorporates the narratives of African American teachers throughout the twentieth century, focusing on those instructors’ challenges to institutionalized racism. In “Constructing Race at an Urban High School: In their Minds, Their Mouths, Their Hearts,” Jody Cohen begins with the definition of multicultural education as that which “has been interpreted as assimilating students of color into the mainstream,” and works to redefine multicultural education as that which is based on communication, experiential research, and student participation (290). Placing critical theory next to a model of social integration, William G. Tierney argues in “The College Experience of Native Americans: A Critical Analysis” that a critical theory model holds the potential to modify power relations by hearing individual voices and “working with Native Americans toward a participatory goal of emancipation and empowerment” (323). Cameron McCarthy notes that race and racism have been inadequately theorized and, in “Beyond the Poverty of Theory in Race Relations: Nonsynchony and Social Difference in Education,” suggests a nonsynchronous strategy that focuses on race as well as class and gender, pushing curriculum reform beyond any homogenous strategy and thus move beyond the “essentialism, reductionism, and dogmatism” that plague “current theories of race relations in education” (346).
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