The socially and linguistically diverse classroom is known to be a setting where visions clash. On the example of Austria and Germany, students with particularly severe experiences (e.g., forced migrants) have been shown to articulate particularly high ambitions for their school careers (Thüne/Brizić 2022). Teachers, by contrast, often evaluate these students as overly ambitious, with a striking focus on the students' physical voice as being 'too loud', 'too silent', or 'too unpredictably alternating between the extremes' – in short: as inappropriate for the institutional setting (Ibid). This centredness around physical voice, however, easily leads to losing sight of the students' learning progress and further contributes to already highly unequal opportunities in European education systems (cf. OECD 2019).
And yet, there is another yet related perception: teachers tend to perceive themselves as highly 'uncomfortable' and 'uncertain' whenever interacting with students with particularly severe experiences. This is documented, above all, in the case of students' whose communities look back on a history of discrimination and persecution. In Germany and Austria, among the most prominent examples are Roma and Sinti as well as Kurdish students who repeatedly seem to cause teachers' uncertainties; and already Jewish students, having fled from Nazi Germany to England, reported their teachers to have felt highly uncomfortable in view of their students' experiences: "Nobody asked me. (...) You could not talk about that ..." (Thüne 2019: 164). In sum, what seems to unsettle the teachers is a perceived loss of the teacher-as-expert role in light of their students' experiences (Gilham & Fürstenau 2020: 31).
Taking a different approach, this paper regards uncertainty as indispensable for encountering "those we can never fully understand" (cited from Call for Papers). In this spirit, I will define teachers' uncertainties also as a sign of responsibility, grounded not only in (un)informedness, but rather in concerns (cf. Butler 2005: x), e.g., the concern to touch upon traumatic experiences. This allows to re-frame the teachers' hearing not just as uninformed but as meaningful for proceeding to a (self-)conscious listening. The central role of the listening subject, in turn, allows an understanding of the students' voices as sociolinguistic Voice, i.e. the ability to make oneself heard, understood, and considered worth hearing (Hymes 1996: 64), hence with the capacity to elicit an ethical response, here: the teachers' (self-)reflexive Listening. On the example of institutional interactions with teachers, I will outline some basic steps towards a Theory of Voice and discuss its implications for teacher education and practice in times of increasing forced migrations.
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Gilham, P./Fürstenau, S. 2020. The relationship between teachers' language experience and their inclusion of pupils' home languages in school life. Language and Education 34(1), 36–50.
Hymes, D. 1996. Ethnography, Linguistics, Narrative Inequality: Toward an Understanding of Voice. London.
OECD 2019. PISA 2018 Results (Volume II): Where All Students Can Succeed. Paris.
Thüne, E.-M. 2019. Gerettet. Berichte von Kindertransport und Auswanderung nach Großbritannien. Berlin.
Thüne, E.-M./Brizić, K. 2022. Voices Heard. Autobiographical Accounts of Language Learning after Forced Migration. Language and Education (in preparation).
