Event overview
Dialogue and discipline: Exploring the mechanisms through which underprivileged voices are suppressed at school
Professor Julia Snell, University of Leeds
'No-excuses' schooling has gained significant traction in recent years. This approach combines high expectations for academic achievement with strict discipline, rigid adherence to rules and regulation, and a highly structured learning environment. In this talk, I argue that the underlying logics of the no-excuses philosophy are not new; rather its popularity today reflects a resurgence of long-standing beliefs about students from low-income and racialised backgrounds.
I argue that these beliefs – namely, that marginalised students require strict discipline and a controlled pedagogic approach to achieve middle-class ‘success’ – disadvantage these young people by denying them access to academically productive classroom discussion. Here, I expose tensions between the instructional approaches typically adopted in schools serving underprivileged students and talk-intensive (or ‘dialogic’) pedagogies.
While research has shown that dialogic teaching and learning can raise academic achievement, it is still relatively rare to find dialogic talk in UK and US classrooms. Moreover, students from lower socioeconomic status backgrounds are less likely than their more privileged peers to have access to good quality classroom discussion. In this talk, I open up the ‘black box’ of classroom interaction to uncover the factors behind this disparity. Drawing upon linguistic ethnographic analyses of classroom interactions, I illuminate the mechanisms through which the voices of underprivileged students are suppressed at school and show how students work to disrupt this problematic dynamic.
In closing, I argue that preconceptions about students’ backgrounds, fuelled by neoliberal educational reforms, are a significant impediment to the enactment of dialogic pedagogy and a critical constraint on its potential to act as a level for educational equity.
Microsoft Teams meeting, see meeting link below
Meeting ID: 392 573 876 505
Passcode: bhchNu
Dates & times
| Date | Time | Add to calendar |
|---|---|---|
| 28 Feb 2024 | 3:00pm - 4:00pm |
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