Structuring experience as shared practice prevents it from silencing others.

Evidence

If experience is already invoked in the classroom as a way of knowing that coexists in a nonhierarchical way with other ways of knowing, then it lessens the possibility that it can be used to silence. When I teach Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye in introductory courses on black women writers, I assign students to write an autobiographical paragraph about an early racial memory. Each person reads that paragraph aloud to the class. Our collective listening to one an other affirms the value and uniqueness of each voice. This exercise highlights experience without privileging the voices of students from any particular group. It helps create a communal awareness of the diversity of our experiences and provides a limited sense of the experiences that may inform how we think and what we say. — bell hooks, Teaching to Transgress, 170

Categorization

• ADDENDUM: A concrete pedagogical strategy against silencing that extends the classroom-as-community theme from earlier chapters; could ground an essay on ritualizing student voice.
• XREF: connects to: Denying student experience provokes its aggressive assertion in class. — bell hooks, Teaching to Transgress: Education as…, 175; Shared reality is woven from irreducibly perspectival individual experience — Sarah Bakewell, At the Existentialist Café: Freedom,…, 988; Group solidarity can form through shared bodily practice, not shared ideas — Nina Eliasoph, Avoiding politics: how Americans…, 686 (+7 more)

Broader Connections

• Group solidarity can form through shared bodily practice, not shared ideas #corroborates (0.85) — Nina Eliasoph, Avoiding politics, 686
• Shared reality is woven from irreducibly perspectival individual experience #expands (0.80) — Sarah Bakewell, At the Existentialist Café, 988
• Collective ways of life depend on embodied practice, not just recognition of group identity. #corroborates (0.80) — Talal Asad, Formations of the Secular, 868
• Shared physical co-presence enables the cognitive harmonizations that build subjectivity #corroborates (0.80) — Yves Citton, The Ecology of Attention, 72
• Shared bodily experience anchors the cross-cultural sharing of other minds. #corroborates (0.75)
• Collective practice anchors and sustains attention activism #corroborates (0.70) — The Friends of Attention, Attensity!, 327