“They gonna yell whether or not I talk, so why bother:" Navigating silence in an alternative school in Alabama

In this paper, we position our work with alternative school students in Alabama as a Project in Humanization (Kinloch & San Pedro, 2014; 2017) to explore the transactional nature of silence at the school. Drawing on data generated over the course of one semester with students in an agriscience elective class, we construct alterna-narratives to examine the varying ways in which educators at the school expected and responded to student silence and voice, using silence as both a currency and a punishment that ranged from the false promise ofre-entry at the main high school to further exclusion from the setting. We juxtapose these transactions to students’ desires for their lives to illustrate how dehumanizing silence and its uses in schools can be.