M uch recent scholarship in the humanities has focused on “giving a voice” to marginalized populations. For most of the groups scholars describe, “not having a voice” is a metaphor. For me, it is a literal condition.
Two years ago, I was diagnosed with reflux laryngitis, a condition that has severely limited my speaking and has forced me to radically alter my pedagogy. Because I am a voice-disabled educator, my classes in literature and writing are powered by the voices of students. It strikes me that in music, the conductor is silent but commands the sounds of an entire orchestra. Since my diagnosis, I have learned to be like that conductor. In this way, my pedagogy explores how disability can lead to innovation. But it is also a tribute, an acknowledgment of a debt. It is a reordering of hierarchies and the channels through which knowledge and power get distributed. As educators, we often envision ourselves as agents who give others a voice, but more recently I have been considering what it means for students to give their professor a voice.
When I was diagnosed with laryngopharyngeal reflux, medicine kept my condition mostly under control. Then one January morning I woke up and could not produce sound. The doctor put a scope down my throat and announced that I had endured a vocal-cord hemorrhage. I had no voice, and the semester was beginning in one week.
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During the period that followed, my pedagogy was transformed. Instead of lecturing solo, I delegated vocal responsibilities. I emailed my students — most of whom I had never met — to ask if they would be willing to serve as leaders in the classroom, reading my notes and discussion questions as I directed them. I assured them that everyone would get a chance to lead with me during the semester. Our class would become not only a writing seminar but also a public-speaking forum.
I taught the opening classes that spring — in modern poetry, James Joyce, and two sections of composition and literature — without uttering a word. Like the ones I subsequently taught, they were small, discussion-based classes.
Gradually I worked my way up to speaking about 30 minutes a day. The first semester was challenging, but as time went on I refined my technique. In the fall, I began emailing students the course agenda in advance so they could practice; the following semester, I piloted the pre-class consultation, in which students would come to my office and practice their oratorical skills. In these meetings we learned that it’s not just what you say but how you say it that counts.
In small ways, my students took on more responsibilities, too. Some of them, I discovered, had secretly been longing to write on the chalkboard, a task I usually performed. Before class, one student assistant persuaded me to let him do it instead. After that, a few other students began writing key terms on the board, sometimes because I instructed them to, but other times of their own volition. As they explained genealogies in the Iliad or made charts listing the characteristics of literary periods, I sat back and enjoyed their performance, smiling as they turned to the board to underscore a key word and then turned back to the class with a kind of professorial emphasis, chalk in hand.
S ome days my speaking is strained and other days my voice feels more natural. It will be like this for the foreseeable future, and while corrective surgery is a possibility, it comes with risks and is not always successful.
With the aid of my in-class leaders, I have been able to save my voice for answering questions, responding to students’ comments, and interjecting ideas spontaneously. I participate in discussion alongside my undergraduates, while my student assistant delivers the preplanned materials. Of course, there have been times when student assistants mumbled, read too quickly, mispronounced words, or otherwise slipped up. I do my best to convert those mistakes into learning opportunities.
Once, as we were transitioning between two activities, my assistant skipped over a line of explanation connecting the two. Seeing the class’s confusion, he asked, “Wait — was I supposed to read that line?”
I nodded, and he read aloud the missing link.
Such blunders added humor, but they also exposed the machinery of the course, allowing students to see the raw materials that pulled the discussion together. Although a few students complained or found the format awkward, everyone learned from the collective process. The class, as one of my colleagues described it, became an exercise in metacognition.
Students in my courses did not just go along for the ride; they held the road map in their hands. And sometimes they blazed paths that were not on the original map. This creativity can happen in any class, but a setup with student leaders can make it more organic. For instance, in my war-themed composition class, “Writing and Critical Inquiry,” one of the ROTC students went off-script during the lecture he was delivering for me and began adding details about Syria. Expanding my point about Omran Daqneesh, the 5-year-old boy who made global headlines when he was injured in Aleppo, my student launched into a background of the Assad regime and its tensions with rebel forces. Through improvisation he became not only a co-deliverer but also a co-author of that day’s lecture.
Serving as my assistants, shy students became prominent voices in the classroom, disclosing leadership potential that may otherwise have blushed unseen. Student leaders surprised me in other ways, too — by making jokes, interjecting random comments, or initiating witty repartee. Those improvisations enlivened the atmosphere — as one student put it, they “made the class ‘ours.’ "
A strong, friendly dynamic established by the student assistant could change the atmosphere, alter the melody, inspire new sound waves in the classroom. I liked to experiment with the symphony of voices, to orchestrate different arrangements that drew upon students’ strengths: An undergraduate studying Italian pointed out key locations on a map of Venice, while a student with a booming voice called out “one-minute warning!” to peers as they finished up cacophonous group work.
In the war-themed composition course, I arranged for silence as students edited one another’s papers, then took pleasure in the eruption of musical voices as I directed, “Share feedback with your partners.”
Another time, in a duet of sorts, I asked a freshman who had written an exceptional paragraph to read it aloud. He paused strategically every few sentences so I could add commentary.
As the semester came to an end, my literature class was reading Virginia Woolf’s novel To the Lighthouse. In it, she describes two cleaning ladies who work to restore a well-to-do family’s vacation house in preparation for the return of, among others, a cultured painter named Lily. I encouraged my students to think about who makes it possible for the rest of us to paint, or read literature, or go to school.
But I had something else to say to them, too: “On a personal and professional level, I ask myself, ‘Who makes it possible for me to teach?’ It is not a higher-up person who comes in here and reads my notes and questions for me. It is my students, it is you. Thank you for giving me a voice. Thank you for making this class possible.”
Amanda Sigler is an adjunct assistant professor in the University of Virginia’s department of English.
