“I Prefer Not to Answer”: Politically Agentive Communicative Silence in Nonprofit and Community-Based Education with Immigrant Students
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This paper conceptualizes a form of silence employed by immigrant learners in adult education. Based on an episode occurring during an educational study on nonprofit and community-based organizations, this paper highlights adult immigrant students’ use of silence simultaneously to object to teachers’ practices and to protect themselves. A review of interdisciplinary scholarship demonstrates limitations in conventional views of silence as a communicative lacuna signaling students’ processing, inability to participate, experiences of marginalization, or resistance. Drawing upon insights from political science, social movement studies, and international relations, the author conceptualizes politically agentive communicative silence as a multivocal form of expression employed by immigrant students in heterogeneous learning contexts to disrupt power asymmetries while maintaining membership. Apprehending immigrant students’ use of politically agentive communicative silence draws attention to practitioner authority and occasional missteps, inviting consideration of how culturally and linguistically dynamic students contribute to the epistemic, ethical, and political realities of adult learning.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".