This presentation was delivered at the joint HEA/UKCISA Internationalisation of Pedagogy and Curriculum in Higher Education Conference that took place at the University of Warwick on 16th and 17th June 2011.
In the internationally diverse classroom co-identifying talk and effective learning foregrounds questions about the dynamics of participation where a range of factors may militate against the talkative engagement of all students and risks their marginalization. Studies have documented student struggles to engage orally in classroom activities because of language challenges confidence or cultural communication preferences. Equally practitioner research to date has tended to characterize a lack of talkative student participation as primarily a skills gap to overcome. Relatively little literature has explored the relationship between silence and talking from the perspective of cultural pedagogy considering issues of culture power and knowledge legitimacy arising from participatory styles. This presentation explores constructs of active and reflective learning in the context of the international classroom highlighting tensions between classroom talking silence and participation. It draws on small-scale qualitative research conducted in the postgraduate classroom and concludes with some reflections on the active use of silence in the international classroom.
