Public and Personal Voices in Adolescents' Classroom Talk

Abstract

In a reanalysis of data from a year-long study of classroom discussion of text, we looked at the factors that influenced the degree to which students' personal voices became part of the public talk of two classrooms, one an 11th-grade U.S. history class in a large urban high school, and the other an 8th-grade language arts class in a Southern university town. Data consisted of observation field notes, videotapes and audiotapes of class sessions, and interviews with students and teachers. Our reanalysis probed the factors that seemed to inhibit students' public voices, the evidence of silenced students' potential to make contributions to classroom talk, and the implications both for individual students and for the classroom community when students do not participate in classroom discussion. Our findings suggest that student participation in discussion is influenced by competing discourses in a classroom, including peer and gender relations and differing conceptions of teaching and knowledge. We also found that encouraging students to exercise their personal voices in the public forum of the classroom entails risks for both students and teachers.