Between Speaking and Silence

Explores the question of student silence from students perspectives and challenges the conventional wisdom about silent students. Why are students silent? Using written reflections and interviews, Mary M. Reda examines students perceptions of speaking and being silent in a first-year composition classroom, and explores how their teachers, classroom relationships, and their own sense of identity shape their decisions to speak or be silent. By challenging many firmly held beliefs about...
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Explores the question of student silence from students perspectives and challenges the conventional wisdom about silent students. Why are students silent? Using written reflections and interviews, Mary M. Reda examines students perceptions of speaking and being silent in a first-year composition classroom, and explores how their teachers, classroom relationships, and their own sense of identity shape their decisions to speak or be silent. By challenging many firmly held beliefs about those quiet students in the back of the classroom, Between Speaking and Silence offers the new vision that silence is not necessarily problematic. Between Speaking and Silence will ring universally true for almost any professor it offers an inquiry and a set of questions that just may transform our teaching practice. Teachers College Record Mary M. Reda is Associate Professor of English at the College of Staten Island, City University of New York.