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Abstract

This article advances a teaching strategy to help students reflect on how they engage in class discussion by considering silence and silencing of voices in classroom discussions among peers as epistemic violence where a student’s capacity as a knower is questioned. We provide examples of silence(ing) we experienced as graduate international students from the Global South studying educational policy and leadership studies in the United States, to then share how we have used silence as a pedagogical tool to deconstruct the assumptions of the field and the society that keeps the silence as normative. We introduce third thinging as a teaching practice to create epistemic trust when ways of knowing and being are incommensurate. We explain in this paper how as educators, silence can be a tool to humanize difference rather than to silence marginalized knowers.

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