“In low-income schools, then, the process of inquiring into students’ lived experience is assumed, a priori, unsafe territory for teachers and administrators. Silencing permeates classroom life so primitively as to render irrelevant the lived experiences, passions, concerns, communities, and biographies of low-income, minority students.

In the process, the very voices of these students and their communities, which public education claims to enrich, shut down”

Excerpt from Fine (2003) “Silencing and Nurturing Voice”

The silence epidemic, if you will, that we are witnesses of today is doing everyone a great disservice. To students, it [the silence epidemic] communicates a lack of interest, on the educator’s part, in who they are as individuals and the very real struggles they as low-income, minority students face on a daily basis. To teachers, it becomes a very dangerous safety blanket and an excuse to not further educate themselves on difficult, unfamiliar, and even sometimes unfathomable topics. If an educator is completely unaware of the lives of their students outside of the classroom, they will not know how to invest in and engage their students, nor will they know how to best handle situations that may arise. How are we to make student-subject connections and see high student engagement if we are not actively pressing in to our students, inquiring about their lives outside of the classroom, and finding ways to incorporate, or help them to discover, their interests and passions in our lessons? By not allowing for these two worlds to intersect, home and school, educators allow the chasm to expand even greater and hinder new opportunities for growth and understanding for their students as well as themselves. If “knowledge is power”, as Sir Francis Bacon once said, we must analyze the current situation and target the powers we are intentionally, or unintentionally, keeping these students from having.

I must admit that as someone who grew up in a white, upper-middle class family, I am not-so-blissfully unaware of much that goes on in low-income, minority communities. Oftentimes, I feel overwhelmed by and ashamed of my own ignorance. In my attempts to learn more, I don’t even know where to begin, what to look up, or who to believe. I’ve realized that my silence stems from my own ignorance and the debilitating feeling of not knowing how to broach certain topics or of not having anything substantial to assert.