Silent Listenings: Deconstructive Practices in Discourse-Based Research

Abstract

In this article, I respond to Wanda Pillow’s (2000)challenge to Educational Researcher and other educational journals to provide more working examples of postmodern research not in an effort to contain such research, but in an effort to irrupt or break apart efforts at containment. Specifically, I present a methodological approach for listening to the “silences” revealed in my conversations with White teachers regarding their racial identity. Those silences, present both in the absence of speech and in speech acts, were “heard” through the use of a deconstructive practice for listening to the conversations. This deconstructive practice allowed the silences to disrupt the tranquil assurance of the spoken word.