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don’t ask me to withhold judgment of dharun ravi: a response to danah boyd & john palfrey

Feb 25th, 12 / 2 Comments

danah boyd and John Palfrey would like us to stop bullying Dharun Ravi.

Dharun Ravi, you may remember, is the young man whose Rutgers University dorm-mate, Tyler Clementi, committed suicide days after Ravi apparently used his computer to record, watch, and tweet about Clementi’s sexual encounters with another man. Here are the details as boyd and Palfrey explain them:

What seems apparent is that Clementi asked Ravi to have his dormroom to himself on two occasions – September 19 and 21 – so that he could have alone time with an older gay man. On the first occasion, Ravi appears to have jiggered his computer so that he could watch the encounter from a remote computer. Ravi announced that he did so on Twitter. When Clementi asked Ravi for a second night in the room, Ravi invited others to watch via Twitter. It appears as though Clementi read this and unplugged Ravi’s computer, thereby preventing Ravi from watching. What happened after this incident on September 21 is unclear. A day later, Clementi’s body was discovered.

boyd and Palfrey make it clear that they are appalled by anti-LGBTQ bullying and by the suicides of so many queer youth. Yet they are concerned that the public response–near-universal and vehement condemnation of Ravi and his actions–itself verges on bullying.They write:

Tyler Clementi’s suicide is a tragedy. We should all be horrified that a teenager felt the need to take his life in our society. But in our frustration, we must not prosecute Dharun Ravi before he has had his day in court. We must not be bullies ourselves. Ravi’s life has already been destroyed by what he may or may not have done. The way we, the public, have treated him, even before his trial, has only made things worse.

I can’t summon the language to describe how vehemently I disagree with boyd and Palfrey. It’s hard to believe they’re even seriously trying to convince readers that what Ravi did to Clementi is equal to how the American public is reacting to what Ravi did to Clementi.

Imagine this, somewhere, in some schoolyard:

A boy, call him Jake, gets accused of being too effeminate. Another boy, call him Sam, corners Jake behind the slides at recess and punches him in the eye. He says, “That’s for acting like a faggot.”

Another boy, call him Tom, sees the fight, walks over and punches Sam in the eye. He says, “That’s for acting like an asshole.”

boyd and Palfrey would have us believe that both punches must be seen as equal, that both should be viewed as bullying. Are these actions equivalent? Only if you have only the most surface understanding of what constitutes bullying.

When LGBTQ students are bullied, they are attacked for their non-normativity. They are attacked for being different, for being threatening to the status quo. Violence is one really good way–but certainly not the only way, about which more later–to subdue a threat. When Sam punches Jake, he is motivated by fear. Is it fear that motivates Tom to punch Sam? Probably not. It’s probably anger, frustration, and a desire to stand up against reprehensible behavior. It’s a desire to make a stand–to make a public stand–to say “this behavior will not be tolerated.”

Has the public reaction to Dharun Ravi’s actions ruined his life? Yeah, probably. And here’s where I differ from boyd and Palfrey: I believe that the public’s reaction is fully appropriate in response to anybody who acts as reprehensibly, as vilely as Ravi did toward his roommate. This is a man who invaded his roommate’s privacy, who was so goddamned proud of recording and watching Tyler Clementi’s sexual encounters that he tweeted about it. This is a man who was perfectly comfortable ridiculing, belittling, and dehumanizing another human being. The only appropriate response is to stand up against such vile behavior. The only appropriate response is to take a public stand that says “this behavior will not be tolerated.”

It gets worse, because boyd and Palfrey have the nerve to suggest that one reason we should be kinder to Ravi is that there’s a chance that his actions didn’t lead directly to Clementi’s suicide:

As information has emerged from the legal discovery process, the story became more complicated. It appears as though Clementi turned to online forums and friends to get advice; his messages conveyed a desire for getting support, but they didn’t suggest a pending suicide attempt. In one document submitted to the court, Clementi appears to have written to a friend that he was not particularly upset by Ravi’s invasion. Older digital traces left by Clementi – specifically those produced after he came out to and was rejected by those close to him – exhibited terrible emotional pain. At Rutgers, Clementi appears to have been handling his frustrations with his roommate reasonably well. After the events of September 20 and 21, Clementi appears to have notified both his resident assistant and university officials and asked for a new room; the school appears to have responded properly and Clementi appeared pleased.

I think boyd and Palfrey hope that this information will help readers view Ravi in a kinder light–which is utterly ridiculous. Are we supposed to assume that Clementi didn’t feel bullied by Ravi’s behavior simply because school officials agreed to place Clementi in a new room? Are we to hold off judgment of Ravi’s behavior simply because there’s no evidence that Ravi’s behavior led directly to Clementi’s suicide?

It is hard to believe that two people as well read and intelligent as danah boyd and John Palfrey can seriously take such a simplistic view of bullying, of violence, of harassment and depression and suicide. It’s hard to believe that they seriously want us to be kinder to Dharun Ravi based on the possibility that his reprehensible behavior didn’t directly cause his roommate to kill himself. Assuming the reports of Ravi’s actions are accurate, he was only the last person to have the opportunity to bully Tyler Clementi. That may make him not guilty according to legal standards, but it certainly certainly certainly doesn’t make him innocent.

And let’s remember that Dharun Ravi is not on trial for the death of Tyler Clementi. He’s on trial for invasion of privacy, witness and evidence tampering, and bias intimidation–a hate crime that requires that prosecutors prove Ravi was motivated by an anti-gay bias. Let’s further remember that our legal system serves a different purpose than does the court of public opinion. Our legal system is for figuring out whether someone has broken the law. Public opinion is where a culture makes clear how it feels about that person’s behavior. When the LAPD officers accused of beating Rodney King were acquitted, the nation was in outrage: The racism was too blatant, and too appalling, to ignore.

Just as Dharun Ravi’s behavior is, thank christ, too blatant and too appalling to ignore. It’s about goddamned time people got mad about homophobia and anti-gay hate. It’s about goddamned time people stood up en masse for the dignity of their LGBTQ brothers and sisters.

And another thing: Let’s not forget that young men and women like Tyler Clementi are convicted to death by the court of public opinion. Why do LGBTQ youth commit suicide at such higher rates compared to their straight peers? Because of social pressures to conform. Because of religious and conservative groups that tell queer kids that they’re abominations who are destined for hell. Because of families and friends who turn their backs. Because of bullies and assholes like Dhuran Ravi.

boyd and Palfrey end with this exhortation:

To combat bullying, we need to stop the cycle of violence. We need to take the high road; we must refrain from acting like a mob, in Clementi’s name or otherwise. Every day, there are young people who are being tormented by their peers and by adults in their lives. If we want to make this stop, we need to get to the root of the problem. We should start by looking to ourselves.

Here is where boyd and Palfrey and I, at last, agree: We should start by looking to ourselves. We should, all of us, consider what cultural biases, what personal beliefs and prejudices, guide us in extending our sympathies and emotional and intellectual energies. “Ravi’s life,” write boyd and Palfrey, “has already been destroyed by what he may or may not have done. (my emphasis.) The way we, the public, have treated him, even before his trial, has only made things worse.”

There is, in fact, no doubt that Ravi did record and view Tyler Clementi’s sexual encounters; there is no doubt that he showed at least a snippet of his recording to his friends. There is no doubt that he boasted about these escapades via Twitter. What’s left for doubt is to wonder what leads us to want to wait to decide how we feel about what he did until the court tells us how guilty he is of violating the letter, not the spirit, of our nation’s laws.

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now begins the experiment

Feb 22nd, 12 / 0 Comments

I started teaching college students nine years ago, when I was a graduate student in Colorado State University’s Creative Writing program. After I finished up there, I spent a few years as an adjunct instructor teaching almost any class that any university could offer me. Back then, I had little formal training in the theory and practice of teaching. I mostly went by feel, by what felt successful to my students and to me. By “successful,” I mean to point to activities and classroom language that led to higher engagement, more discussion, more efforts to challenge what the textbooks, what the instructor said was “true.”

Back then, I believe, I was heading toward a classroom pedagogy that treated teaching as a practice of freedom. In Teaching to transgress, bell hooks writes:

Education as the practice of freedom is not just about liberatory knowledge, it’s about a liberatory practice in the classroom. So may of us have critiqued the individual white male scholars who push critical pedagogy yet who do not alter their classroom practices, who assert race, class, and gender privilege without interrogating their conduct.

I don’t know if it’s possible to become a liberatory teacher without sustained research and interrogation of dominant pedagogical practices; that is to say that I don’t know if an adjunct instructor, working effectively in isolation from her teaching community, can engage in a sustained critique and reframing of what it means to learn and teach toward freedom instead of toward submission and repression.

Now I’m teaching again, this time at a Research I institution, in a department that wants its academics to value research over teaching. (While Colorado State University is also a Research I institution, I was not there to get a Research I education; I was learning how to write poetry in an MFA program.) This time around, I have career goals and a plan for myself; my plan includes sustaining enough Awesomeness to snag a job at a Research I institution once I finish up at Indiana University.

This institution does not emphasize teaching as the practice of freedom; in fact, it doesn’t particularly emphasize teaching as something that requires a whole lot of sustained interrogation or time or energy. Which is not to say that individual faculty members at my institution do not value teaching, do not strive to be excellent teachers; only to say that their efforts are the result of a personal desire to teach well, and are not supported by the institution.

You get tenure at a Research I institution by doing good research, not by doing good teaching.

So I’ve taken several steps backward in the movement toward teaching as the practice of freedom. I rely an awful lot on Powerpoint and the lecture; I ask students to rearrange the desks into a discussion circle sometimes, but I don’t insist that we use this structure for a whole lot of discussion. More than once this semester, I’ve asked my students why they do what I say: “Why do you agree to work in small groups when I tell you to?” and “What do you think would happen if you just refused to listen to my lecture today?” But I haven’t required them to speculate with me.

And to tell the truth, I haven’t really wanted my students to speculate with me on these things. I’ve wanted these challenges to be seen as thought experiments, not as real challenges to rethink how they approach learning.

My students are, for the most part, studying to be teachers. Some day, assuming we continue to value teaching and assuming the economy continues its turnaround, my students will be teachers themselves. If I believe in the importance of liberatory pedagogy, if I believe that teachers can and should do better, can and should foment revolution, then the only ethical way to proceed is to attempt to practice this pedagogy in my own classrooms.

Now begins the experiment. I’ll keep you posted.

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mike rose, the mind at work and how academics get working-class credibility

Feb 14th, 12 / 0 Comments

This post is about two recent works by Mike Rose, an educational researcher at UCLA who focuses, as he describes it, low-status places–working-class schools, blue-collar job sites, remedial classrooms–places not privileged by society or, frequently, by the institutions in which they are located” (Rose 2012, p. 2). The two works are:

Rose, M. (2004). The Mind at Work: Valuing the intelligence of the American worker. New York: Penguin.

Rose, M. (2012). Rethinking Remedial Education and the Academic-Vocational Divide. Mind, Culture, and Activity 19(1): 1-16.

I’ve been using The Mind at Work as an anchor text for an undergraduate educational psychology course, and I was just prepping to discuss chapter 4, “the vocabulary of carpentry” as I got distracted scrolling through the xmca listserv in which several members of the listserv were discussing Mike Rose’s article “Rethinking remedial education.

The article starts out with a bang:

What you see depends on where you sit, and for how long. You enter the classroom from the rear, wanting to be discrete on your first visit, and slip into the desk closest to the door. A few students 20 notice you, but most are walking around or leaning over to the person next to them talking. Except for one woman, the class is all men, 20s and 30s, a few White guys, the rest Black and Latino. Hoodies, baggy pants, loud profanity. The teacher is in front at a cloudy overhead projector. Three men are around him—each seems bigger than the next—and they are arguing.

The room is old and dingy, no windows, bare except for the irregular rows of desks, the table 25 with the projector, a cart holding pipes and metal bars, and in the corner a worn flag from the American Welding Society. You’re trying to take it all in when a sullen guy in an oversized T-shirt, a bandanna around his head, walks over to you and asks, “What are you doin’ here?”

Rose explains that “[t]his is an article about perception and ability, about the way beliefs about cognition blend with social characteristics—class, race, gender—to create both instructional responses and institutional structures that limit human development for people already behind the economic eight ball.” We read his opening paragraphs, we get a sense of what this classroom is like, what its students are all about. But, Rose explains, our first impressions are wrong: The surroundings, the foul language, the clothing choices–they belie an effort to develop serious vocational skills. They belie these students’ focus, sense of purpose, and intelligence.

And that guy who wanted to know what you’re doing here? Well, it’s a legitimate question, isn’t it? And everything depends on how you answer it. When it was posed to me, I said I was here to study programs like this one because we need to know more about them to convince our politicians that we need more of them. The man’s features softened, and we moved out into the hallway. “We need programs like this,” he said. “People like us.” “It’s the teacher that really makes a difference,” he continued. “He treats us like we’re people.”

In the chapter from The mind at work that I’m prepping for today’s class, Rose writes: “What testing vocabulary do we have, for example, to discern the making of judgments from the feel of things, or the strategic use of tool and body, or the rhythmic spacing of tasks, or the coordination of effort and material toward the construction of a complex object?”

Certainly the purpose of this book, and of a lot of Mike Rose’s work, is not to show how skills developed through welding, for example, or waitressing or carpentry or what-have-you can help you advance beyond a given vocation. In fact, in the introduction to his excellent book, he gently criticizes a discourse that treats working-class activity as romantic because of its physicality. He writes:

How interesting it is…that our testaments to physical work are so often focused on the values such work exhibits rather than on the thought it requires. It is a subtle but pervasive omission. Yet there is a mind at work in dignity, and values are intimately related to thought and action.

I’ve also been interested to watch how Mike Rose and other scholars focusing on blue-collar work establish their orientation toward blue-collarness–primarily by establishing credibility by pointing to personal experience with blue-collar work. I do this all the time: I say that I grew up in a working-class household. I say that I am public school-educated all the way from kindergarten to graduate degree(s). I say that before I came to academia I was a groundskeeper, a cashier, a phone operator, blah blah blah. This is designed to, perhaps, “prove” I have access to the exotic world of the blue-collar worker, to “prove” I have cachet.

Yet if I were to tell Ray, the pseudonym for the aspiring welder in Mike Rose’s “rethinking remedial education” who asks Rose why he’s in the classroom, about my “working-class credibility,” what do you think he would do? Me, standing there, a white, well educated academic who can choose when to enter his classroom and when to leave, whose livelihood both does not depend on whether I can learn today’s math lesson and rests on the backs of those learners who are trying to do precisely that?

I think it’s far less common for researchers to use their personal backgrounds to “prove” they “understand” research participants who come from more privileged backgrounds–say, students in a gifted and talented program or students completing advanced graduate work. Perhaps researcher credibility does not need to be established in these cases; perhaps its existence is simply understood.

“I used to ______, but now I _________.” When we demonstrate our class-ness, when we offer our personal histories, we assume we’re confessing our relationship to the phenomena of interest. And certainly that’s part of it.

But when we say “I used to _______” or “before I came to academia I _______” are we attempting the opposite of “going native”? Are we actually simultaneously feigning distancing ourselves from academia while in fact embracing it fully? We have the best of intentions, but to what extent do our best intentions serve only to further stigmatize and Other our research participants without actually leaving us with any taint of Other?

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on snobbery and digital literacy instruction

Jul 17th, 11 / 0 Comments

cross-posted from HASTAC.org

I’ve been thinking lately about Roger Ebert and digital media snobbery.

I found out through my colleague John Jones that Ebert, a blogger and film critic, recently attacked the publication of “easy reader” editions of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby. His main concern appears to be that these abridged versions of Gatsby omit the poetic language of the full text:

Fitzgerald’s novel is not about a story. It is about how the story is told. Its poetry, its message, its evocation of Gatsby’s lost American dream, is expressed in Fitzgerald’s style–in the precise words he chose to write what some consider the great American novel. Unless you have read them, you have not read the book at all. You have been imprisoned in an educational system that cheats and insults you by inflicting a barbaric dumbing-down process. You are left with the impression of having read a book, and may never feel you need return for a closer look.

Is Ebert correct? Sure, I guess. You know, Larry McMurtry’s Lonesome Dove is my favorite novel not because of the plot, but because of how the plot is conveyed. Same thing with another favorite, Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude. We pick our favorite books and movies and songs and so on in large part because of a nebulous feature we might call style. Clearly Gatsby is one of Ebert’s favorites, and he wants others to experience the novel like he did and does.

This desire to bequeath to others our magical interaction with a text iis what leads us to force people to watch our favorite TV shows, even though we know they’re just going to get distracted or bored and stop paying attention because they need to check their email or grab some chips from the kitchen or they just got a text from someone they sort of like and they have to figure out how to respond and meanwhile DONNA NOBLE IS ABOUT TO ASK THE DOCTOR THE NAME OF HIS PREVIOUS COMPANION AND HE’S GOING TO SAY IT WITH SUCH TRAGEDY AND PAIN IN HIS VOICE THAT YOU’RE GOING TO KNOW EVERYTHING YOU NEEDED TO KNOW ABOUT HOW HE FEELS ABOUT ROSE TYLER AND jeez never mind let’s just watch Parks and Rec instead.

So I’d be on board if Ebert said he wanted others to experience Gatsby and other canonical novels as he did, and left it at that. But no. Ebert takes it a step farther:

I never read a simplified text of a novel in my life, and to the best of my knowledge neither did any other graduates of St. Mary’s Grade School or Urbana High School — not in school, anyway. The first book I read was Huckleberry Finn, and I got through it just fine, encountering hundreds of words I didn’t know.

It’s not snobbery to say “I did things this way and you can too”; it’s snobbery to say “I did things this way and if you don’t do things my way you are not as smart as I am.” The latter seems to be precisely what Ebert wants us to hear in his argument.

(Snobbery, by the way, is also what has led lots of people to embrace the Core Knowledge approach to education.)

I have a touch of technological snobbery. I browbeat people who use Internet Explorer until they switch to Firefox or Chrome. I make fun of friends who live without smartphones, and–in a particularly low moment for me–I once made fun of a family member when she began an online information search at about.com.

That kind of snobbery is annoying but not necessarily dangerous–until it gets codified as an approach to digital literacy education. It’s easy, I think, to fall into the trap of believing one way of understanding social media technologies is the best way of understanding social media technologies. We say we want kids to develop an understanding of the complexities of digital technologies, but we mean that we want them to embrace digital technologies–to love new media like we love new media.

It’s literacy snobbery when we try to teach kids what to think about technology instead of how to think about technology. In this respect, I worry that educators who stand on very different sides of the digital literacy issue embrace a very similar, problematic attitude: I did things this way and if you don’t do things my way you’re not as smart as I am.

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I guess I’ll be submitting proposals for the 2012 AERA Annual Meeting

Jul 13th, 11 / 3 Comments

At the end of my last trip to the Annual Meeting of the American Educational Research Association (AERA), I decided I no longer wanted to submit proposals or attend the conference. I had lots of reasons, but here are some of the biggest:

The AERA Annual Meeting embraces mainstream (nonthreatening) research. As researcher and activist Jeff Duncan-Andrade pointed out in a session I attended, AERA offered up Diane Ravitch at its opening plenary session. Ravitch, after 30 years of supporting standardized testing and teacher accountability based on test results, recently reversed course and stood up against standardized assessments. “Which is super,” Duncan-Andrade said, but added that Diane Ravitch should be spending the rest of her career in apology to all the kids whose lives she helped to destroy.
The AERA Annual Meeting does not support dissenting or alternative voices. It’s true that lots of individuals and a handful of sessions introduced radical or controversial theories or ideas, but those were drowned out by the plenaries, featured speakers, and sessions designed to promote the general mainstream of educational research.
The AERA Annual Meeting does not effect or result in any significant, lasting change in education.
The AERA Annual Meeting is expensive. Which wouldn’t be a problem if the membership and attendance fees resulted in any significant, lasting change in education. But it doesn’t.

So. Here we are, a mere 9 days before the submission deadline for AERA 2012, and I’m preparing to submit at least four different proposals, and I’m hoping to have at least one accepted so I can go to Vancouver in mid-April. I haven’t changed my mind about any of the points above. So why in the world am I spending so much time and energy on a conference that goes against everything I believe comprises good educational research?

Someone’s gotta be the chainsaw. I know lots of people who feel like I do about AERA, and some of them have chosen to no longer attend. It’s a good decision, choosing not to participate in the AERA circus, and it means those people can spend their energies in far more awesome ways. But we also need people to work on tearing AERA down, and I’m willing to do my best.
Someone’s gotta bring the heat. If accepted, I promise to introduce dissent, to introduce an alternative perspective in my presentations, in my participation as an audience member, and in my attendance at business meetings for the Divisions and SIGs of which I am a member.
Someone’s gotta bring the challenge. I am planning on organizing a protest against the fees and ineffectuality of AERA. Tentatively, I plan to organize attendees to commit to donating the $70-$205 they would spend on registration fees for the Annual Meeting to one or more local educational initiatives. Attendees could announce their participation in this protest by wearing an armband indicating their refusal to pay the registration fee. Let’s say that just 4% of the estimated 13,000 attendees donate their registration fees. That would result in a pool of at least $70,000 to support local initiatives–a drop in the bucket to some, but a much needed income source for others.

What do you think, dudes? Wanna join me in taking a chainsaw to AERA?

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on a related note…

Jun 5th, 11 / 1 Comment

There are times when I feel very happy and comfortable with fighting for equal rights for all humans alongside all humans who care to take up the fight, regardless of their gender or sexual orientation. There are times when I am awed and humbled by the work of my nonqueer friends, family, and colleagues to understand, embrace, and support the rights of people whose lives and choices and needs and interests they don’t and can’t ever fully understand. There are times when I see straight allies as (almost) as heroic as the queers whose rights they’re fighting for.

This does not happen to be one of those times.

It’s been a rough couple of weeks for me. I’ve been attacked, stigmatized, and bullied because of my gender and sexual orientation. I’ve been accused of horrible things. These accusations began as I attempted to start a conversation about the role of straight privilege and male privilege in academia. I wanted to begin from my experience of feeling silenced and harassed, of being on the wrong end of both of these forms of privilege.

It was suggested that I’m seeing things that don’t actually exist.

Yes, we know that in conversation males are more likely to silence females than the other way around. Yes, we know that heterosexism is insidious and hard for nonqueers to recognize, just like the signs of White privilege are hard for white people to recognize. Yes, we know that the dominant group is likely to dismiss the experiences of marginalized groups, is likely to explain that it’s all in your head.

We are sympathetic to these truths and want to work to change these things. But, really, Jenna–these things you think you’re experiencing are all in your head.

It was suggested that my real issue isn’t that I’m struggling against heterosexism or anti-womanism, but that I’ve probably had some bad experiences with men, possibly quite recently, which is making me oversensitive.

Well, yes. I’ve had some bad experiences with men, and some of those experiences were quite recent–and that’s utterly beside the point.

I think black people have had a few bad experiences with white people and that has made them oversensitive about how white people interact with them.

It’s not fair for the differently abled to think that our entire country is against them, just because they’ve had to deal with a few ignorant people.

You feminists are just touchy because you don’t like men.

So I’ve written a series of posts recently about my frustrations with people who identify as straight allies but who behave more like an enemy. Right now I’m not feeling conciliatory, and those posts don’t strive to appease or make peace.

I’m tired, you guys. Right now I’m just tired.

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Taylor Mali: “What teachers make”

Apr 18th, 11 / 0 Comments

Here you go.

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Friday quote bag

Apr 15th, 11 / 0 Comments

“The phrase, “technology and education” usually means inventing new gadgets to teach the same old stuff in a thinly disguised version of the same old way. Moreover, if the gadgets are computers, the same old teaching becomes incredibly more expensive and biased towards its dumbest parts, namely the kind of rote learning in which measurable results can be obtained by treating the children like pigeons in a skinner box.”

Papert S. (1980). Teaching Children Thinking in Taylor, R., Ed., The Computer in School: Tutor, Tool, Tutee. New York: Teachers College Press. pp. 161 -176.

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know your rights for the National Day of Silence

Apr 14th, 11 / 0 Comments

This Friday, April 15, is the National Day of Silence, a day in which students are asked to stand, in silence, in protest of the harrassment, bullying, and silencing of LGBTQ youth in schools. If you are a student who is considering participating in the Day of Silence, you need to know your rights in advance of the protest. Below is a document published by Lambda Legal in which your rights as a student are detailed.

April 15, 2011 is the National Day of Silence, a student-led action sponsored by Gay, Lesbian and Straight Education Network’s (GLSEN) in which thousands of students around the country will remain silent for all or part of the school day to call attention to the harassment and discrimination faced by lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender youth.

Over the years, GLSEN and Lambda Legal have heard from hundreds of students, parents and allies who have encountered resistance from their schools and school officials in response to their efforts to participate in Day of Silence activities. Whether a school’s actions are based on school officials’ misunderstanding of the law, a desire to avoid controversy, or intended to blatantly discriminate against LGBT-supportive speech, they may be violating your rights even though they are less obvious forms of discrimination and censorship.

Do students have the right to participate in and advocate for the Day of Silence?

In most circumstances, yes. Under the Constitution, public schools must respect students’ right to free speech.The right to speak includes the right not to speak, as well as the right to wear buttons or T-shirts expressing support for a cause. This does not mean students can say—or not say— anything they want at all times. There are some limits on free speech rights at school.

For example, schools have some control over students’ speech in the classroom or during other supervised, school-sponsored activities.If a teacher tells a student to answer a question during class, the student generally doesn’t have a constitutional right to refuse to answer. Students who want to remain silent during class on the Day of Silence are less likely to encounter problems if they seek permission from their teachers beforehand.

However, school officials are NOT allowed to discriminate against you based on your message. In other words, school officials may not censor a student just because they disapprove of the student’s ideas, because the student’s speech makes them uncomfortable or because they want to avoid controversy.Outside of the classroom, in areas like hallways and cafeterias, students have a much broader right to free speech. Schools can’t censor students unless they use lewd or foul language, promote illegal drug use, harass other students or substantially disrupt the school environment.

If you believe your right to freedom of expression has been violated, Lambda Legal may be able to help or advise you. www.dayofsilence.org/legalhelp

Do students have a right to display posters and make announcements about the Day of Silence?

In many circumstances, yes. If a public school generally allows students or student organizations to display posters or make announcements on the public address system—the school may not deny or otherwise restrict your right to display posters or use the PA system based on your message or viewpoint (so long as you do not use lewd or foul language, promote illegal drug use, harass other students or substantially disrupt the school environment).So if students are generally allowed to announce events and put up posters on school property, Day of Silence participants must be allowed to announce events and put up posters too.

If you believe your school is unlawfully restricting or censoring your right to freedom of expression, Lambda Legal may be able to help or advise you. www.dayofsilence.org/legalhelp

Can a school justify banning speech by claiming it will be disruptive?

In most circumstances, no. If a public school wants to restrict student expression because it fears disruption, school officials have to show facts that reasonably lead them to believe that the speech will cause a substantial disruption to the school.A school can’t just assume that the Day of Silence or speech related to it will disrupt the school. And schools can’t censor students just because other students might respond in a disruptive way. If students who disagree with a speaker’s ideas create a disruption, the school can punish the disruptive students but can’t punish the speaker.So, for example, if a Day of Silence participant puts up a poster and another student responds with name-calling and harassment, the solution must be to discipline the harasser and to protect, not censor, the Day of Silence participant.

If you believe you have been unfairly punished or censored based on the school’s claim of “disruption,” Lambda Legal may be able to help or advise you. www.dayofsilence.org/legalhelp

What if a school says it has to restrict Day of Silence activities so community members won’t think the school is endorsing the event?

Schools have more control over student speech if other students or community members would reasonably believe the speech represents the school’s own speech or viewpoint. For example, if a student helps write an official school publication, like a school newsletter, the school has some control over what the student says because people reading the publication may think the school endorsed the student’s expression. But this doesn’t give the school the right to control what students express on their own, or what they express through means generally open for independent student expression at school, like posters and morning announcements. Schools cannot discriminate against students based on their ideas in those situations because nobody could reasonably think that the student speech represents the school’s speech. In the words of former Supreme Court Justice O’Connor, “[t]he proposition that schools do not endorse everything they fail to censor is not complicated.”

If you believe your right to freedom of expression has been violated or that you are being unfairly censored based on your school’s claim of “endorsing” Day of Silence, Lambda Legal may be able to help or advise you. www.dayofsilence.org/legalhelp

Can a school restrict student speech because it offends other students or parents?

No. So long as student expression isn’t lewd or profane, advocate violence or illegal activity and doesn’t harass others, schools can’t restrict it just because some students or parents find it offensive. “If there is a bedrock principle underlying the First Amendment, it is that the government may not prohibit the expression of an idea simply because society finds the idea itself offensive or disagreeable.”

If you believe your right to freedom of expression has been violated, Lambda Legal may be able to help or advise you. www.dayofsilence.org/legalhelp

Are there other ways in which schools might interfere with Day of Silence activities -aside from blatantly denying students the right to participate?

Yes. Although your school may allow you to participate in some DOS activities, they may also restrict or infringe on your ability to do so in a way that violates your rights. Examples from past years include:

Not providing students with an opportunity to meet with the Principal, or otherwise attempting to avoid giving students permission to participate in Day of Silence activities and then telling students that “it is too late”;
Telling students that they cannot individually participate without a club to sponsor DOS;
Attempting to rename the DOS “Diversity Day” or otherwise co-opt students’ messages;
Allowing students to use the PA system, but rewriting what the students want to say or providing a script;
Providing students who do not want to be exposed to DOS messages an excused absence (a get-out-ofschool-free pass);
Allowing students to have a table to distribute materials, but requiring the table to be in a location or at a time where students rarely pass by.

If you feel that your school is unfairly restricting your ability to participate meaningfully in Day of Silence, Lambda Legal may be able to help. www.dayofsilence.org/legalhelp

More questions?

For more information about students’ legal rights, contact one of Lambda Legal’s regional Help Desks. Phone numbers and additional information are available at: www.lambdalegal.org/help.

For more information about the Day of Silence, including tips on how to organize your own Day of Silence at your school, visit www.dayofsilence.org.

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