Joyful noise and abatement: idle chatter and the undercommons of oracy education

Abstract

This paper imagines oracy education as a reaching-out for connection with the irreducible socialities of black study. In the wake of imperialist functions of literacy, classroom talk has been left to defend its value against traditionalist views which rebuke, as one UK education minister put it, “idle chatter in class.” We argue that oracy education risks doubling down on the value system outlined by this rebuke – and the white settler-colonial onto/auto-epistemology mobilised therein – if it measures the value of talk within this purview. We follow the undercommons of black study and the poetics of relation toward revaluations of idle chatter and noise as modes of thought. We explore the abundant participations of noise beyond the colonial errand of abatement, and we elaborate the relational stakes that idle chatter may invent. We reorient the stakes of the learning conversation with its single guiding lesson into the vibrant jazz riff of a learning cacophony that leaves the continuous echo of possible lessons behind it, proposing new ways of valuing oracy education and new possibilities for participation. Our chatty inquiry practices this ethics, overlapping our shared classroom experiences with discussions of theory and our discussions of theory with yet new possible experiences.