"Silencing" the Powerful and "Giving" Voice to the Disempowered: Ethical Considerations of a Dialogic Pedagogy

Silencing" the Powerful and "Giving" Voice to the Disempowered: Ethical Considerations of a Dialogic PedagogyAs an educator who is committed to social justice, I bring certain values and political commitments to the classroom. The counter-hegemonic voices that I bring into the classroom in the form of constructs, readings, assignments, discussions, and visual culture challenge more often than confirm students' world-views and/or assumptions. Influenced by Paulo Freire's theories of education, Ronald David Glass (2004) has written extensively on the potential of education as a practice of freedom. Yet, he concludes that educators consistently silence certain voices and amplify others through the selections they make for the curriculum, the structure of assignments and assessments, and the overall classroom environment. Similarly, Nicholas C. Burbules (2004) observes that the commitments of socially engaged teachers often determine what is discussed and which views are heard and validated. The question that arises for me is whether I am silencing students' voices through my teaching practices. Does the support of dialogic articulations and interests constitute privileging or defending one "truth" or discourse over another? If so, am I using dialogue as a rhetorical device to persuade or to indoctrinate my students according to beliefs that I personally find emancipating? These are certain beliefs that, frankly, some students in my courses have met with various acts of resistance, ranging from disapproving silence to outright rejection. In this investigation, I use Mikhail Bakhtin's (1984) theory of dialogism to reflect on the limits of dialogue in tension within my own teaching and explore the function of dialogue and dialogism in relationship to pedagogy.The stories or pedagogical encounters that I remix, i.e., recollect, interpret, recreate, and retell to use Lev Manovich's (2005) term, are composite narratives1 that I hope capture the essence of my teaching experiences at two different universities. For me, interrogation and contestation of controversial issues are processes that are needed for dialogic teaching and learning. In this, I am compelled to take a stance or defend the idea that as educators we must not only accept but also embrace education as a contested space. Sites of contestation are not inimical to dialogue but vital and constitutive of dialogic relations. In fact, tension-filled places of learning offer valuable working spaces to de (fence) or transverse barriers. By transversal, I am referring to a stance that claims a critical middle ground. Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari (1987) characterize the middle as a place that gets its strength and energy from the oppositional forces that surround it.2 Accordingly, I encourage students to raise questions, voice reservations, and discuss disagreements in relationship to course content through written journals and during class discussion. There have been occasions when students' dissenting voices have openly and categorically condemned difference and diversity (ethnicity, gender, sexual orientation) in a highly negative way-a position that in my teaching experience is most often used to support what students identify as conservative political and religious worldviews.In my university teaching experience, particularly in courses geared toward elementary education and art education majors, students are primarily female and Caucasian. Most often, the students self-identify as middle-class, holding conservative political views, and as supporters of conservative Christian values. The multiple subject positions that shape my personal and professional realities, for the most part, are historically, politically, and culturally different from my students'.3 In addition to identifying with the political and Evangelical Right, during class discussion, students in my courses often named reality shows with plenty of partying, semi-nudity, and intimacy scenes (e. …