Excluded/Marginalized Voices

The concept of excluded/marginalized voices is rooted in Black feminist thought. Emerging during the late 1960s, the concept of voice has played a central role in Black women's writing. Black female academics aimed at creating a powerful voice that linked the historical subjugation of Black women's knowledge to the way in which [Page 360]knowledge has been produced both within and outside of the academy. By establishing a connection between voice, the personal experiences of marginalization, and political resistance, this work contributed to new methodological approaches that challenged traditional sites of knowledge production. These scholars struggled to give voice to the experiences of communities that were traditionally excluded from, marginalized by, and subjugated to official knowledge.

Feminist scholars joined curriculum theorists to probe how and what knowledge was legitimized not only within academic research, but also in all educational institutions. The concept excluded/marginalized voices developed with the underlying premise that educational institutions are a microcosm of larger society. Schools reproduce social inequities by reflecting and perpetuating dominant cultural attitudes and values. Educational practices exclude certain voices while privileging others by positioning certain ways of knowing as objective and devoid of racial, gender, and class politics. In addition to excluding individual voices, the exclusion of particular issues and experiences from curriculum and policy debates has had the effect of silencing and further marginalizing collective voices. This structuring of silence occurs as power dynamics sustain and legitimate the silencing that occurs at an institutional level. Curriculum scholars have critically challenged policies, discourses, and practices that enabled the structuring of silence. This is often accomplished through the analysis of discursive practice, as well as highlighting the complex ways in which gender, race, class, sexual orientation, and other categories of marginalization intersect.

Within the larger aim of democratizing schooling, curriculum scholars attend to these processes, as they recognize that even within structured silence the dissenting voices of students and teachers can be heard. Curriculum theorists ask how these silenced spaces are created and simultaneously resisted. In this way, they have moved beyond the concept of silence by demonstrating that those in the margins not only do speak, but also their voices sometimes tell us a great deal about how educational structures actually work. Drawing on feminist scholarship, such as bell hooks's early works, the concept excluded/marginalized voices has thus shifted from a metaphor of space (on the margins) to one of sound, focusing on the practices of silencing as well as resistance through voice within and around schools.

Within curriculum studies, the conceptual use of excluded/marginalized voices is interdisciplinary. The term bridges feminist, critical, postcolo-nial, literary, legal, and multicultural theory. This is related to the interdisciplinary nature of its foundations in feminist thought. Feminist scholars have drawn on curriculum studies to link voice, marginality, and silence to concepts of conscientization and self-actualization. bell hooks's prolific work on pedagogy exemplifies the trajectory of the concept of voice between Black feminist thought and curriculum studies. Drawing extensively on Paulo Freire's framing of education as the practice of freedom, bell hooks sees the classroom as a space where all students can participate in the process of coming to voice, questioning dominant truths and authorities that have sys-temically excluded and marginalized voices both within and outside of the classroom. Henry Giroux has contributed to this conversation by attending to how power operates and is implicated in the production of knowledge. He notes the important ways in which youth resist silencing mechanisms by producing their own modes of expression through which to resist dominant narrative and tell their own stories.

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