UNLOCKING LITERACY LEARNING
Yolanda Majors & Evan Ortlieb  |  Editors
Silence as Indicator of Engagement
Yolanda Majors
A Question of What Gets Read
Student engagement is a significant predictor of student
learning and achievement (Shernoff, 2013). If classroom
engagement is the golden eagle, then its counterpart,
silence, is the miner’s canary and lifts its voice in re-
sistance to the seen and unseen lurking ahead. Like
the miner’s canary, the silences that once pervaded my
classroom warned of impending danger. Schein (1990)
argued that a useful inquiry into an organization’s cul-
ture is possible when viewing it across “three funda-
mental levels at which it manifests itself: (a) observable
artifacts, (b) values, and (c) basic underlying assump-
tions” (p. 111). When viewing the classroom from an or-
ganizational perspective, silence is transformed from
a verb (causing to become silent) to a noun (the state of
being silent). As such, classroom culture becomes that
visible and observable target. To unlock students’ lit-
eracy learning, we must be open to reading artifacts of
classroom culture and recognizing silences as engage-
ment. Efforts to understand engagement have led to a
consideration of its antithesis: “If a student is not en-
gaged, then what are they?” (Trowler, 2010, p. 3). When
students are not engaged, or in fact are disengaged, can
their silence be an instrument of instruction?
Some time ago, I was teaching a literacy course de-
signed to introduce students to the concept of literacy
events. The underpinnings of the course were opportu-
nities to tune their awareness to the situatedness of lit-
eracies and literacy tools. My goal was to engage them in
learning through a process of questioning what gets read,
who the reader is, and how members of classroom com-
munities grapple with text, particularly texts which they
deem disempowering (Majors, 2015). My perspective was
such that learning, both in and out of school, is “as much
about shifts in participation in social and cultural practic-
es and activities as about shifts in ways of thinking (Lave
and Wenger, 1991; Rogoff, 1993, 2003)” (Nasir, 2012, p. 21).
Students were presented with a range of activities that
drew on a critical literacy perspective. My hope was that
such perspectives would inform their understanding of
texts: what we identify as those meanings within texts,
as well as what we, the readers, eventually make of those
Journal of Adolescent & Adult Literacy    Vol. 61   No. 1   pp. 91–93
meanings. In addition to course readings and discussions,
I presented my mostly white, female students with oppor-
tunities to observe high school classroom instruction. I
wanted to enhance their learning experiences by expos-
ing them to classroom discourses to draw on their obser-
vations with the theories that we were encountering.
Through my experiences as a woman teacher of color,
I have encountered students who, for whatever reason,
were unwilling to talk about their beliefs and values as
emerging from a complex cultural landscape. I have of-
ten wondered as to the motivations for their silences in
this regard, at times attributing such silences to a kind of
passive attempt at othering the teacher. As one student
anonymously stated in a course evaluation, “The only
thing that she can do for me is sweep my floors.” At other
times, I have thought that perhaps they are just not sure
what they are supposed to say, or are afraid of the teacher
or one another. Regardless of their motivations, the chal-
lenge for the educator is to read and unpack their assump-
tions, because no matter how painful, creating a space
that allows for shifts in their thinking to occur is the job.
Such was the challenge in my classroom when my
university students were given the opportunity to visit
and observe literacy practices at the nearby high school,
where I was also a language arts instructor conducting
research. The goals for this visit/activity were to have
university students use their observations to make sense
of class readings. My vision was for a kind of engaged dis-
course, through which both groups of students practice
literacies that help them understand what it means to be
human (Majors & Lewis, 2017). What occurred instead
was silence among my university students, who recoiled
against my demand for consideration of how many of our
social and institutional structures keep them from see-
ing the humanity within themselves (Baker-­Bell, Butler,
& Johnson, 2017), followed by masked excuses of many
to not visit the school. Implicit in their stance was what I
perceived to be a collective, unconscious sensibility that
normalizes their familiar cultural experiences, against
the backdrop and maintenance of a lesser known and/or
opposing other (Tolle, 2005).
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 UNLOCKING LITERACY LEARNING
Taking Stock of Silence as
Classroom Cultural Artifact
Many years later, I am taking stock of the silence in
my classroom to ponder how it gave way to inertia
rather than what is popularly considered engagement.
Classroom discourse events are a kind of community
of practice in which participants represent culture by
evoking shared meanings and understandings through
their performance and behaviors. Culture—what a
group accumulates, learns, and shares over time—com-
prises all sorts of assumptions, ways of being and know-
ing, “that ha[ve] worked well enough to be considered
valid and, therefore ... is to be taught to new members
as the ... correct way to perceive, think, and feel in rela-
tion to those problems” (Schein, 1990, p. 111). If culture
is the accumulated byproduct of teaching and learning,
and discourse the medium by which agreement of what
counts as culture is conveyed, then it must stand that
talk is the coveted artifact of culture, and its counter-
part, silence, the Holy Grail.
Rather than reflecting its intent to be a space where
students could “think critically and develop the skills to
formulate, document and justify their conclusions and
generalizations” (Banks, 1998, p. 32), my classroom be-
came a site of conflict, resistance, and silence. The arti-
fact of such engagement, understanding, was displayed
in some of the students’ written responses. For example,
a handful of students who were able to move beyond
their assumptions embraced the opportunity to visit my
high school colleagues’ classrooms. Inherent in much of
my students’ pre and post written work, however, was a
lack of connection between what the teacher whom they
observed did in terms of structuring the course design
and student learning outcomes. In other words, engage-
ment was conceptualized by the university students in
terms of how the teacher they observed was emotionally
involved with his or her students.
As one student described, the “White female high
school teacher’s attitude” toward the high school stu-
dents was “stern, but motherly.” Such an analysis illu-
minates what Thompson (2003) suggested is the moral
convention of the white “innocent” woman—held as
keeper and symbol of virtue, honesty, benevolence, and
white middle class femininity. Innocent white femi-
ninity is often constructed in opposition to dangerous
black masculinity. Whiteness symbolizes “good,” and
such goodness codes within it superiority. Maternal
feminism places white female teachers as keepers and
spreaders of morality: missionaries, teachers, and
reformers (of brown people), rescuing and studying
brown people. Such “rituals of emotional expression”
Journal of Adolescent & Adult Literacy   Vol. 61   No. 1
build on a moral identity inherent in the institutional
view of equity-­m inded instruction and in conscious-
ness raising, displays of empathy or care in the class-
room. Empathy “implies that the problem belongs to
women of color and requires only the sympathetic feel-
ings of White women” (p. 44). Thus, rather than view-
ing instruction as an intellectual enterprise, for many
of my university students, an important requirement
for teaching was to care about the kids. The high school
students’ receptivity of care, therefore, becomes the
measure of learning and engagement.
In response to what I perceived to be students’ dis-
interest in visiting this particular high school, I decided
to host a group of the high school students as visitors of
my university class. I had hoped that the students might
gain a sense of pride and agency through their engage-
ment with college students on campus. One aspect of
the activity was that each group would present the oth-
er with questions related to their respective identities
as high school student or college student. Although I
thought this a good idea at the time, the miner’s canary
saw things differently as it watched from its perch on
top of the lectern. Oblivious to its existence, I divided
the entirety of my university class into five groups of
three, and the visiting high school students made up
a single group of five. I was excited, thrilled even, to
see my envisionment of a town hall meeting coming to
fruition. I believed strongly that “the usefulness of the
knowledge we acquire and the effectiveness of the ac-
tions we take depend on the quality of the questions
we ask” (Vogt, Brown, & Isaacs, 2003, p. 1). Therefore,
each group was encouraged to collaboratively develop
interview questions to guide, draw out, and enhance
our understandings of one another’s experiences and
perspectives. Several members of the undergraduate
class volunteered to go first: “Have you ever seen a fight
in class?” “What’s it like to live in a dangerous neigh-
borhood?” “Do you think it makes a difference to come
from a single-­family home?” “Do you like music?” “Do
you think you’ll graduate, and if so, what will you do af-
ter that?”
With a stern side-­eye, the miner’s canary declared,
“I told you so,” before f lying out the open classroom
window, taking with it any hopes that I had had of an
instructional win. What is more important here is the
university students’ engagement. For example, one by
one, the young adult college students eagerly offered
up questions, which as one high school student stated,
mirrored the persistent stereotyping that they had un-
fortunately come to expect of all people outside of their
community. The fact that such questions were coming
directly from future teachers, however, left them with
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 UNLOCKING LITERACY LEARNING
more questions than answers, such as “Do you think it
would have made a difference if they [pre-­service teach-
ers] had come here [the high school] to talk to us on our
turf?” and “[Our school] is an urban school, and all their
stereotypes and what they believe is that urban schools
is for the black kids or minority kids that just disrupt the
classroom and fight all day and don’t learn anything.”
While my high school students openly reflected on
their experience, my university students were far less
candid, if not completely silent. When asked to share
their thoughts, only three students of the five groups
who participated spoke openly and only to express their
belief that “things had gone well.” The rest of the class,
choosing not to engage, remained silent. One’s applied
definition of student engagement “contains assumptions
about who carries the responsibility for student engage-
ment, and thus who can—or should—be tasked with the
accountability” (Trowler, 2010, p. 7). As Thompson (2003)
contended, representatives of the other that match
white understandings of the other gain prominence, and
alternative stories do not. Thus, in attempting to bridge
the gap between their two worlds, I had perhaps engaged
the students in the opportunity to discover what they
already knew. Directly or indirectly, I was complicit in
classroom silence that resulted in disengagement, the
implications of which I continue to grapple with.
From Silence to Probing
What can be learned from students’ silences to under-
stand engagement? I would argue that an inquiry into a
classroom’s culture may be useful for assessing, analyz-
ing, and perhaps breaking such silences. Schein’s (1990)
theory of organizational culture is helpful in this regard
when viewing classroom engagement across “three
fundamental levels at which it manifests itself: (a) ob-
servable artifacts, (b) values, and (c) basic underlying as-
sumptions” (p. 111). When viewing the engagement from
this perspective, silence is transformed from a verb
(causing to become silent) to a noun (the state of being
silent) and, as such, becomes that visible and observable
target of my focus and analysis. In acknowledging the
silence that permeated my classroom and labeling it an
artifact of its culture, I move closer to understanding its
meanings, its utility, and better yet, a pedagogical strat-
egy that would enable me to disrupt and transform it.
According to Schein (1990), however,
the problem with artifacts is that they are palpable but hard
to decipher accurately….Taken in isolation, cultural arti-
facts are especially problematic in this regard because the
lesson [meaning of the artifact] is not clear if one does not
understand the underlying assumptions behind it. (p. 112)
Journal of Adolescent & Adult Literacy   Vol. 61   No. 1
To identify those cultural meanings that insiders at-
tach to artifacts, Schein (1990) recommended a kind of
collective probing, one that digs deeper into the mean-
ings attributed to relevant artifacts in a way that en-
ables their underlying values, philosophies, objectives,
epistemologies, and ideologies to come to light. Ideally,
if I had organized follow-­up writing and discussion to
allow the underlying values, philosophies, objectives,
and epistemologies of students to be released rather
than repressed, student engagement would have had a
greater opportunity for success in my classroom, un-
packing, disrupting, and shifting silences along the way.
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Baker-Bell, A., Butler, T., & Johnson, L. (2017). The pain and
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Majors, Y. (2015). Shoptalk: Lessons in teaching from an African
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Thompson, A. (2003). Tiffany, friend of people of color: White
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Tolle, E. (2005). A new earth: Awakening to your life’s purpose.
New York, NY: Penguin.
Trowler, V. (2010). Student engagement literature review. York,
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The department editors welcome reader comments.
YOLANDA MAJORS is the associate director
of adolescent literacy and learning at the
University of Minnesota, Minneapolis, USA;
e-mail ymajors@umn.edu.
EVAN ORTLIEB is a professor and the
coordinator of the Literacy Programs at St.
John’s University, New York, NY, USA;
e-mail ortliebe@stjohns.edu.
93 July/August 2017    literacyworldwide.org