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At a Focus on Research event, Professor Katherine Entigar shared their emerging research in the field of adult newcomer education. The questions they raise about the meanings of silence in the classroom struck a chord with the audience comprised of OISE faculty, graduate student, and postdoctoral researchers and educators. 

Entigar’s interest in the expressive potential of silence is rooted in their deep commitment to adult immigrant learning. Both their teaching and research is in this area, especially in relation to multilingual meaning-making. In addition, Entigar is an interpreter and consultant for language learning programs for LGBTQ2+ refugees and multilingual communities in non-profit and community-based contexts. 

At the heart of Entigar’s research is a focus on belonging, inclusion, and self-determination in education. “Newcomers have historically been both included and excluded in Canadian society,” Entigar said. “On the one hand, they are valued as productive agents for their contributions to our economy. On the other, they are portrayed as passive, grateful recipients with knowledge deficits in need of filling.”

Entigar draws attention to the fact that students are often invited to share their life experiences and perspectives in attempts at inclusion within a diverse learning context. But in the classroom, there is an implicit hierarchy between teacher and student, especially when students are relatively new to Canada and are learning English as a subsequent language. 

In this context, Entigar questions whether the intent to include students from diverse backgrounds and experiences can actually cause harm to students, who may feel discomfort with being “pushed” to participate in “culturally responsive” activities. In some cases, newcomers may experience “inclusive” practices as intrusive or offensive when national stereotypes are applied. Additionally, students who have experienced complex trauma run the additional risk of re-traumatization when recollecting the past in a group setting. In their previous research, Entigar noticed that participants expressed appreciation for having the option “prefer not to answer” in survey questions in specific situations, a means by which they sought to demonstrate agency and self-determination in learning. 

“Inclusive practices can still cause harm,” Entigar explains. “There is an assumption that inclusion is ‘cogenerated with students in a classroom setting,’ but how can students cogenerate meaning when teaching practices exist within a framework which accords ethical authority and knowledge to the teacher?” 

A critical applied linguist by training, Entigar asks whether silence can used as a means by which students communicate and express agency in adult learning.  This idea of silence as generative of meaning goes against the grain of our assumptions. 

“We have this deeply set idea that words are more meaningful than silence, and that silencing is seen as a theft of voice and agency,” Entigar said. “But this reflects a bias. What if instead we saw silence as a means for students to express their agency and identity?”

Challenging our assumptions about silence raises a number of questions. “How can we study silence, something that is defined by absence?" Entigar asks. "How do we look for meaning in what could be seen as a refusal to communicate? Importantly, how do we read silence without projecting our own meanings and narratives?”

To theorize silence, Entigar looks to various disciplines, to linguistics, critical theory, feminist epistemology, and work by other scholars of silence in the field of education. In order to explore these questions, Entigar is recruiting community partners in order to obtain perspectives of newcomers from a diversity of backgrounds to investigate the ways silence may be strategically employed in adult education as a form of political communication. 

Drawing upon feminist and poststructuralist methodologies and theories of inquiry, Entigar has designed multi-phase surveys and interviews that address various situations in which silence might be both communicative and self-protective.

Entigar inspired OISE community members to reconsider how to centre inclusion in educational theory and pedagogy and the possible meanings of silence in the adult education classroom.