Between Silence and Cheer

Abstract

Book banning has exploded in recent years. Conflicts over what texts belong in schools have caused rifts in communities around the nation. Within English language arts (ELA) classrooms specifically, many teachers have been under scrutiny with local groups and national organizations demanding that some teachers be monitored, fired, or even arrested. Backdropped by this socio-historical moment wherein calls for book censorship and attacks against school teachers are commonplace, this three-article dissertation joins the growing scholarship that explores the challenges that arise when teachers and students dare to address topics of race, racism, gender, and sexuality in the ELA classroom. Designed as an ethnographic case study, this dissertation explores how one White ELA teacher and her sixth-grade students engaged with two regularly banned novels in a racially, culturally, and linguistically diverse classroom. The first paper employs critical Whiteness theory to examine the challenges, opportunities, and contextual factors that one White novice teacher encountered as she employed an antiracist approach to literature instruction. It offers a structural understanding of why so many White teachers attempt but fall short of delivering antiracist pedagogy effectively. The second paper traces how three students of Color in the class negotiated their emotions during conversations about race as it emerged within a literature unit. Using critical discourse analysis, I examine how language was mobilized to invite some emotions (e.g., surprise) and inhibit others (e.g., anger), manifesting as “emotional rules” that regulated students' responses to texts. The third paper examines how two LGBTQ+ youths engaged in literacy not only as a medium for identity work, but as a way to speak back to the social, political, and institutional contexts of their schooling. Placing the theatrical performances that queer youth wrote and directed at the center of my analysis, I submit that these literacy activities are a means of understanding how youth see themselves in the world. Taken together, these articles extend the scholarship on how teachers engage their students on issues of difference through literature, raising important questions about how sociopolitical tensions take shape through moments of silence and cheer in the ELA classroom.