argue as i say not as i do… when the french laic school teachers hush a muslim student girl’s voice

argumenta como digo, no como hago... cuando los maestros de las escuelas laicas francesas silencian la voz de una niña musulmana

argumente como eu digo, não como eu faço... quando os professores da escola laica francesa silenciam a voz de uma menina muçulmana

abstract

A key professional skill at leading Community of Philosophical Inquiry (CPI) is the ability to support students in developing contributions that open new lines of reasoning, or kairos. Nevertheless, in a CPI about destiny in a French secondary school, when a Muslim girl tries to articulate her belief in God with human agency, such kairos seems inaudible to the two instructors, one of them even stopping the discussion as it gets too metaphysical. Through an in-depth case study of this dialogue, based on interactional linguistics, institutional conversation analysis, and argumentation studies, we analyze how her contribution is put aside by precisely describing such missed opportunity across the social, cognitive, and emotional planes. We explore hypotheses about why the teacher-facilitators do not give her argument the attention that it deserves. Based on relevant contextual information, our interpretation is that multiple layers of cultural clashes occurring at the micro, meso and macro levels here restrict the philosophical inquiry. We define cultural constructs and perform our multimodal analyses on the video-recorded CPI session and the corresponding transcript. We finally step back from the present dialogue analysis to discuss the long-term effect of such types of missed opportunities as they might create barriers to inclusive multicultural education.

keywords:
educational philosophy; interaction analysis; religion and state; culture; social inclusion; emotions

resumo

Una habilidad profesional clave a la hora de dirigir una Comunidad de Indagación Filosófica (CPI) es la capacidad de apoyar a los estudiantes en el desarrollo de contribuciones que abran nuevas líneas de razonamiento, o kairos. Sin embargo, en una CPI sobre el destino en un instituto de secundaria francés, cuando una chica musulmana intenta articular su creencia en Dios con la agencia humana, tal kairos parece inaudible para los dos instructores, uno de los cuales incluso detiene la discusión al volverse demasiado metafísica. A través de un estudio de caso en profundidad de dicho diálogo, basado en la lingüística interaccional, análisis de conversaciones institucionales y estudios de argumentación, analizamos cómo se deja de lado su contribución describiendo con precisión dicha oportunidad perdida tanto en el plano social como en el cognitivo y emocional. Exploramos hipótesis sobre por qué los profesores-facilitadores no prestan a su argumento la atención que merece. Basándonos en información contextual relevante, nuestra interpretación es que múltiples capas de choques culturales que se producen en los niveles micro, meso y macro restringen aquí la indagación filosófica. Definimos los constructos culturales y realizamos nuestros análisis lingüísticos y multimodales en la sesión de CPI grabada en vídeo y en la transcripción correspondiente. Por último, nos apartamos del presente análisis del diálogo para debatir el efecto a largo plazo de este tipo de oportunidades perdidas, ya que podrían crear barreras a la educación multicultural inclusiva.

palabras clave:
filosofía educacional; análisis de la interacción; religión y estado; cultura; inclusión social; emociones

resumen

Uma competência profissional fundamental na liderança de uma Comunidade de Inquérito Filosófico (CPI) é a capacidade de apoiar os alunos no desenvolvimento de contributos que abram novas linhas de raciocínio, ou kairos. No entanto, numa CPI sobre o destino numa escola secundária francesa, quando uma rapariga muçulmana tenta articular a sua crença em Deus com a agência humana, esse kairos parece inaudível para os dois instrutores, um dos quais chega mesmo a interromper a discussão por esta se tornar demasiado metafísica. Através de um estudo de caso aprofundado desse diálogo, com base na análise de conversas institucionais, da linguística interacional e em estudos de argumentação, analisamos a forma como o seu contributo é posto de lado, descrevendo com precisão essa oportunidade perdida nos planos social, cognitivo e emocional. Exploramos hipóteses sobre a razão pela qual os professores-facilitadores não dão ao seu argumento a atenção que ele merece. Com base na informação contextual relevante, a nossa interpretação é que as múltiplas camadas de conflitos culturais que ocorrem aos níveis micro, meso e macro restringem aqui a investigação filosófica. Definimos construções culturais e efetuámos as nossas análises linguísticas e multimodais na sessão de CPI gravada em vídeo e na transcrição correspondente. Finalmente, afastamo-nos da presente análise do diálogo para discutir o efeito a longo prazo deste tipo de oportunidades perdidas, uma vez que podem criar barreiras à educação multicultural inclusiva.

palavras-chave:
filosofia educacional; análise da interação; religião e estado; cultura; inclusão social; emoções

"Perplexity is the beginning of knowledge." Khalil Gibran, The Prophet, 1923

introduction

Facilitating a Community of Philosophical Inquiry (CPI) with children requires the ability to ‘grasp’ an opportune turn of phrase uttered by a participant, and to foster its development through the dialogue in order to move collective reasoning forward. In the literature on CPI, such a promising contribution is called kairos. Identifying kairos opportunities that may open new lines of inquiry and bouncing off them in a fruitful way is key facilitating skill which might evolve with experience or training (Tozzi, 2014, Delille et al., 2017). Nevertheless, some research has pointed out that facilitators sometimes miss such opportunities (Delille et al., 2017). In particular, they might regulate their surprise at hearing a disruptive kairos in ways that do not foster their further elaboration (Polo & Lund, 2021b). Following Kapur (2008), who argues that failure can be productive for learning, we detail in the present article a specific case of missed kairos, voiced by a Muslim student girl. This case caught our attention as we hypothesize that missing this kairos relies on a laicist, or extremist secular posture towards the Muslim student girl.

During a CPI about destiny a Muslim girl tries to argue that her faith is compatible with human agency, but her argument seems inaudible, or perhaps preferably “unheard” (Roy, 2004). One of the facilitators even stops the discussion when it turns toward the question of God’s (non-)existence. Through an in-depth linguistic study of the dialogue, we describe such a missed opportunity on the social, cognitive and emotional planes. We explore three hypotheses about why the teacher-facilitators do not give this kairos moment the attention that it deserves, and we point out that common pedagogical factors fail to fully explain what happens.

Based on relevant contextual information (Heritage, 1997) and specific multimodal linguistic marks typically mobilized within interactional linguistics (Lindström, 2022) and argumentation studies (Plantin, 2018), our interpretation of the video-taped studied situation is that multiple layers of cultural clashes occurring at the micro, meso and macro levels restrict philosophical inquiry. Consistent with the epistemology of institutional conversation analysis (Heritage, 1997), our perspective is emic: we aim at understanding the studied phenomena from the viewpoints of the participants (Headland, Pike, & Harris, 1990), but it also focuses on the “constraints and contingencies of being in the social situation, where the work being studied is contingent and subject to processes of social change under the impact of culture, social ideology, power, economic forces, intellectual innovation, and other factors impacting change in society” (Heritage, 1997, p. 105).

Before presenting our results, we introduce the context of our study, additional theoretical background, and our research method. In our conclusion, we step back from the present case study to discuss the long-term effect of these missed opportunities and how they could create barriers to inclusive multicultural education.

contextual elements likely to work as resources for the studied interaction

In this first section we present the culture of French secularism and related public controversies (macrosocial context), the practice of CPI at school (meso context), and the specific pedagogical session that we study and its related philosophical content (micro context). Cultural constructs of each of these three contextual layers, either divergent or convergent, may be used by the participants as argumentative resources in the studied setting.

french secularism (laïcité) at school and inclusion of muslim students

France is a global exception regarding secularism: the republic was born in strong opposition to religion. Catholic clergy were considered to be one of the two dominant orders in the Ancien Régime that the revolution had to struggle with to establish democracy. In this context, the Ferry laws of 1881 and 1882, provided extensive access to public school, establishing it as ‘laic, free and compulsory’¹. The public school of the Third French Republic worked as a powerful standardizing institution regarding both the French language and the national curriculum, as a whole. Throughout the French territory, primary school teachers embodying national paternalism ensured that children spoke ‘correct’ French and taught them the official cultural narrative (récit national) without taking into account regional linguistic or historical specificities. Peguy called these teachers ‘the black-coated calvary of the Republic’ (les hussards noirs de la République), which became a common expression (Minois, 2016). The ideal vision of the citizen was seen as a universal subject free from any sociocultural particularities, while aspiring to the common good². However, the large media coverage of a small number of ‘veil affairs’³, from 1989 onwards, instigated public debate that centered particularly on how students displayed Muslim culture at school. Although this debate was very controversial, and the higher relevant court (Conseil d’Etat) judged that the right to instruction prevailed over maintaining secularity, the state still passed a specific law in 2004 forbidding clothes, jewelry, headgear, etc. at school that were religiously ostentatious. The law itself does not target any specific religion, but in practice, its application to Muslim teenage girls is very visible. They must unveil when they arrive to school, and can ‘re-veil’ only when they leave (Langar, 2021). Statistically, students with North African backgrounds succeed less at school. They also have more difficulties than other French students to get accepted into the academic programs they are interested in. This experience nurtures their feeling of being discriminated against (Beauchemin, Hamel, Simon, 2018). In an empirical study, Zirotti (2006) notes that these students tend to develop a ‘posture of revendication’ characterized by a higher sensitivity to educational inequalities and frequent questioning of teacher practices. One could imagine as an outsider that minority students would rather hope teachers fight against inequalities than reinforce them.

In terms of macro culture, French public debate typically uses a polemical, adversarial rhetorical style (Ting-Toomey, 1988), including regarding the highly mediatized and polarizing controversies on laicité. The 2004 law⁴, for instance, is understood by some as extreme secularism, ‘civil religion’ or ‘laicism’ (Prades, 2020), a remnant of colonial control, and as a misguided reaction to terrorist attacks by Islamic extremists. In turn, others argue that restricting the display of religious symbolism is necessary to empower women against religious obscurantism. Issues of identity, agency, discrimination, multiculturalism and Islamophobia, all in historical context, are part of the media potpourri and form the macro cultural backdrop against which our corpus is set (Freedman, 2004).

meso cultures on communicative ethics and associated education models

School culture defines specific roles for both students and teachers (Sirota, 1993; Carrington, 1999). The didactical contract (Brousseau et al., 2020) determines the expected communicative behavior in the classroom, and is defined as:

an interpretation of the commitments, the expectations, the beliefs, the means, the results, and the penalties envisaged by one of the protagonists of a didactical situation (student, teacher, parents, society) for him- or herself and for each of the others (Ibid, p. 197)

Such an interpretation also targets the specific knowledge being taught and the goals orientating the protagonists’ actions. A typical feature of school culture is that the teacher knows the correct answer to the questions that they ask, and that the students should provide it in their response. Mehan (1979) has studied in detail such IRE (Initiate - Respond - Evaluate) dialogue patterns, their variations and implications. From the students’ perspective, school routines then sometimes turn into “guessing what the teacher has in their head” (Harper & Parkin, 2020). Such aspects of school culture differ from the culture of CPI, which relies on collaborative argumentative discourse embodied in a discussion following specific rules (referring to Habermassian ‘communicative ethics’, Tozzi, 2009). Here, the teacher does not know the answer to open-ended questions and must facilitate the discussion among the participants without arguing for their own opinion.

In a complex situation with such a double bind (Bateson et al., 1956), protagonists (here the teachers and the students) may experience contradictions between different expectations. For example, given the rules of CPI, everyone has the right to contribute to construction of meaning, but in a didactical contract, it is the teacher who has the right answer. There is also a tension between the underlying views on education associated with the culture of CPI and the culture of the classroom. On the one hand, the deficit model in school culture focuses on students’ lack of knowledge and skills, which need to be transmitted by the teachers (Xie, Wang, & Hu, 2018), while CPI postulates that children (as well as the adults) have the ability to engage in true philosophical thinking without previous training (Lévine, 2007).

dialoguing about destiny in a disadvantaged secondary school: micro culture

Our study is based on a video analysis of a session of CPI recorded in a disadvantaged urban secondary French school (categorized as ‘REP+’ by the French administration for réseaux d’éducation prioritaire (priority education networks), which gather more students with North-African (Maghreb) backgrounds than the rest of the national territory⁵.

An educational bottom-up initiative emerged from the collaboration between literature, history and geography teachers and a research team working on philosophy for children, which was supported by the school’s principal and which obtained public funding. After researchers trained the teachers to lead CPI, the teachers started to give all the 6th graders an hour of philosophical class every other week, as part of their compulsory curriculum. This initiative was institutionally rewarded as good practice, and some teachers even created an extracurricular club of philosophy for students who volunteered to spend more time at school practicing CPI. This innovation became routine and monthly meetings were held between researchers and teachers to reflect on the educational practice of philosophical dialogue. In this paper, we focus on a session about destiny jointly led by a female literature teacher and a male history teacher in June 2015 with a group of students who had begun to practice CPI bi-weekly since September 2014. In particular, we draw our attention to the missed kairos brought by a Muslim teenage girl, hereafter called Shade, who argued that her faith was compatible with human agency.

Reflections on destiny is part of the official philosophy curriculum taught in the last year of French high schools, particularly as students prepare for the baccalauréat, the national examination that grants access to higher education. More specifically, we illustrate that philosophical school culture relies on a conceptual network that stands on the distinction between destiny and God on the one hand and liberty and humanity on the other. That said, such a binary starting point appears as a dialectical basis for questioning the articulation of divine destiny with free will and, more generally, human agency. Reflecting this, we created a conceptual map (cf. fig. 1) on the basis of key contributions from 1) philosophical authors whose work is put forward as part of the national curriculum for school philosophy (decree of 27-5-2003, Official Journal of 6-6-2003), 2) official knowledge content requirements to recruit philosophy teachers (Pinto, 2007) and 3) manuals of school philosophy (Diagne, 2017). A large majority (64%) of the ‘major authors’ of the curriculum comes from cultures where religion has a predominant place in public, intellectual exchanges, and where it appears relevant to associate destiny and liberty with divinity. This fact nuances the secularization of Western societies making the emergent philosophical culture possible from the 20th century onwards, when religion becomes less influential for thinking, happiness or morality, for instance. The problem of conciliating human liberty with the omnipotence of a God who masters destiny is typical in such a theological-philosophical tradition. For example, according to Augustine (1864), we, as people, believe that we are free to act (human agency) but only because our mind is finite and incapable of understanding the infinite nature of God, who indeed foresees and plans all our actions (divine destiny). Even such a belief in our liberty would come from God, aiming at making us responsible for our choices and actions in order to test our faith. Although arguing in favor of divine destiny, Augustine then recognizes some value to the belief in human agency, and this synthetic view is recognized in our map. (Figure 1)

Figure 1:
Conceptual map involving God, destiny and liberty in French curriculum.

interdisciplinary theoretical background grounding our approach

Below, we specify our position that educational dialogue is characterized by integrated social, cognitive and affective dimensions (2.1). We then present the discussion in research on learning, interaction, and argumentation about the relationship between context, culture, and the dialogic emergence of sense and reasoning (2.2). This section ends with a short specification of the facilitation role in CPI regarding ‘seizing’ or ‘missing’ kairos opportunities (2.3).

educational dialogue as a tripod: social, cognitive and affective processes

There is a (recent, though quite general) consensus in today’s educational sciences that views learning as a tripod process involving cognitive, social and affective aspects (e.g. Baker, Andriessen, & Järvelä, 2013). Nevertheless, to date, very little research has actually accounted for all three of these dimensions in an imbricated manner in the analysis of educational dialogue (Avry, Chanel, Bétrancourt, & Molinari, 2020). Many studies focus only on socio-cognitive aspects of educational processes, or only on the socio-emotional, separate from cognition or with which the link is implicit (Isohätälä, Näykki, Järvelä, & Baker, 2018). Even when the three dimensions are considered, analyses focus on their alternation and not on their interplay (Isohätälä, Näykki, & Järvelä, 2019).

One cultural explanation for such a state of the art lies in the reason/emotion dichotomy (coming from Western philosophy) that characterizes the founding theoretical and methodological approaches undertaken to analyze educational dialogue. In other words, cognition is often misconstrued as a kind of noble activity that should exist independently of potentially fallacious socio-emotional dynamics that may disturb it. In addition, the assumption of this dichotomy also leads to a preference for verbal-only dialogue analysis as if reason were associated with the brain and emotions were associated with the rest of the body. Yet a great deal of other research illustrates the fundamental contribution of bodily communicative acts (e.g., gesture, posture, facial mimics, tone of voice, gaze) to cognitive activity in interaction (Gallagher, 2005). Here, we build on the idea that only such a tripod approach (involving the social, cognitive and affective dimensions) of the practice can fully describe what happens in educational dialogues (Polo & Lund, 2021a). We insist on our view that language is multi-functional, that attempting to put parts of dialogue into limited categories hides its nature, and that dialogic moves cannot be understood in isolation, but are part of an interaction, and are set against a backdrop of context.

research on catching kairos or missing opportunities during CPI

In a CPI, the facilitators are supposed to help the students raise hypotheses about a problem, make them explicit and explore them collectively through dialogue, without requiring any prior disciplinary knowledge (Lipman, 1997). This educational practice aims at promoting democracy by fostering the participation of all students even though they have the right to choose to keep silent (Tozzi, 2009). A central professional skill in leading CPI lies in recognizing student contributions that open new avenues of reasoning, even when initially ill-structured, and in guiding the group to develop these moments of kairos. Yet, the affective regulation of the surprise that accompanies such philosophical openings does not always foster the progression of collective reasoning. Frequently, facilitators redirect discussions toward reconstructing established canonical concepts instead of venturing into unexplored conceptual territories (Polo & Lund, 2021b). Operationalizing kairos identification therefore cannot only rely on whether the opportune contribution is actually taken up as such. A restrictive concept of kairos, focusing on disruptive ideas with the potential to renew the ongoing inquiry, may be identified using the five following linguistic indicators (Polo & Lund, 2021b) : 1) expression of surprise 2) bouncing off a contribution (as a facilitator to emphasize its novelty, enhance its value, ask for further consideration, question it, or situate it in relation to a possible previous antithesis (Tozzi, 2014), 3) bouncing off in the same ways (as another child), 4) repetition (as the contributor) of a disruptive element because its value to the inquiry has not been understood by others, 5) showing discouragement (as the contributor) due to the lack of uptake and elaboration of their contribution .

method: analyzing how interactional uses of culture make kairos inaudible

After making our research questions explicit and describing our dataset, we detail our analytical approach. Only a deep qualitative case study enables us to unpack how cultural constructs participate in the social, cognitive and affective dimensions of dialogue. Concrete linguistic markers then indicate how such a process affects the ongoing philosophical inquiry resulting in missing kairos in Shade’s contribution.

research question & hypotheses

Given the goal of supporting students in developing contributions that open new lines of reasoning, or kairos, why don’t the teachers value and take up Shade’s argument as such? On the contrary, they react as if it was unclear or ‘inaudible’ even though at some point in the dialogue one teacher rephrases it perfectly (although ironically). Our experience in CPI and our theoretical approach allows us to formulate and investigate three hypotheses.

1. H1: The lack of consideration of Shade’s contributions is not due to irrelevancy or incompetency.

2. H2: The fact that the teachers ignore her contribution to some extent is also not due to typical reasons why CPI leaders miss kairos (e.g. due to different strategies teachers might use to regulate affect).

3. H3: Cultural clashes that may occur at individual (micro), school (meso), and societal (macro) levels can help unpack and explain why the teachers hush Shade’s voice.

dataset

The video-recorded CPI session studied, lasting 36 min 38 sec, was first transcribed and broken down by the data provider (Fournel & Simon, 2023) into 839 speech turns. In addition to visualizing the whole session, we carried out full verbal and gestural transcripts on selected parts of the discussion (see Appendices for transcription conventions). We focused on Shade’s contributions to the CPI involving God and teachers’ reactions to them: turns 213-266 (1 min 58 s), 385-411 (53 s), 482-498 (41 s), 545-572 (1 min 48 s), 617-654 (1 min 31), 731-773 (2 min 25 s). The total time of this restricted corpus of 6 excerpts is 9 min 16 s. Given space constraints, we do not fully reproduce the 6 corresponding transcripts. We do present shorter extracts that play a key role in our argument. We translated them into English in the most literal way possible, while making sure that they remain understandable. To manage space constraints, we sometimes describe the interaction referring to turns not quoted in the paper then marked with*, and often shorten the term ‘turn’ using ‘t.’.

analysis of the social, cognitive and affective dialogic uses of culture

The present case study relies on qualitative analyses to explore our three hypotheses. Regarding the cognitive plane (H1), we specify the philosophical missed opportunity and investigate its relevance. In order to appreciate the kairos embedded in Shade’s contribution, we compare it with:

1. the conceptual network we built, associated with destiny in philosophy (cf. § 1.3);

2. the state of the discussion, to specify what it brings to the inquiry.

To achieve such a comparison with a), we specified the didactical content knowledge associated with ‘destiny’ in French school philosophy (cf. fig. 1). To address the extent to which Shade’s contribution opens new avenues for reasoning in the present dialogue (b), we turned to interactional linguistics (Lindström, 2022; Kerbrat-Orecchioni, 2005). Consistent with the epistemology of institutional conversation analysis (Heritage, 1997), our perspective is then emic: we aim at understanding the studied phenomena from the viewpoints of the participants (Headland, Pike, & Harris, 1990), but it also focuses on the constraints and contingencies of being in the social situation, where the work being studied is contingent and subject to processes of social change under the impact of culture, social ideology, power, economic forces, intellectual innovation, and other factors impacting change in society (Heritage, 1997, p. 105).

This linguistic approach (subject to constraints and contingencies) also guides our analyses regarding the affective (H2) and the social (H3) dimensions of the dialogue that we study. Moreover, to deeply address H2 and H3, we do not only look at participants’ speech, but we also pay attention to their co-verbal behavior. Indeed, interactional achievements are multimodal, using any available resources of the participants’ bodies and environment to build indexical meaning-making (Gallagher, 2005, Mondada, 2019). In the present paper, we analyze multimodal aspects of speech (lexicon, prosody, intonations, syntactic organization), gaze and head orientation, facial expression, gesture and body posture.

To address the affective plane, we specifically look at teachers’ and Shade’s multimodal expressions of their emotional state, according to how participants react to the ongoing conversation. On the teachers’ side, we pay particular attention to clues of surprise, which is a typical first affective reaction to students’ new ideas and can help analysts identify kairos (Polo & Lund, 2021b). Surprise may be expressed by silence, interjections, interrogative prosody, gesture or facial mimics, syntactic disorganization, as well as explicit verbal affective utterances (which may turn into skepticism, wonder or astonishment through regulatory work). On Shade’s side, we pinpoint signs of (dis)satisfaction related to her participation in the discussion, along the axis ranging from well-being to discomfort, including gesture, prosody, gaze, facial and verbal expressions. Frustration and repetition of one’s own idea can show that a student feels that a new idea that he or she voiced was missed (Polo & Lund, 2021b). Such an analysis is necessary to explore H2, whether the kairos has been identified or not by Shade and the teachers.

On the social plane, we follow the characterization of the student girl and the male teacher, hereafter called Benoît, all along the interaction, either through self-depiction or hetero-depiction. We have constructed a multi-level (micro, meso, macro) methodological approach where we posit that multimodal linguistic marks signify cultural constructs that the protagonists might mobilize during the dialogue in order to build their own or others’ discursive image:

1. micro, individual culture: conceptual, linguistic and practical knowledge and spiritual (religious or atheist) convictions, embodied in how participants behave, speak, express emotions, relate to each other and to institutions;

2. meso, institution culture: expected typical behaviors, communicative ethics and underlying conceptual views (such as education models) in the present setting (a CPI at school);

3. macro, society culture: argumentative script and interdiscourse⁶ regarding the discussed issue, pre-constructs about the associated discourse objects and conditions and rhetorical style in which they are usually debated.

We carefully follow how Shade and Benoît present themselves and each other, unpacking their argumentative strategies based on ethos. Ethos refers to the partial image of a participant’s social identity that emerges from a dialogue, depicting the person as a more or less reliable argumentator (Plantin, 2018). They are akin to argumentatively oriented images of participants. When ethotic argumentation is explicit, the dialoguing subjects become discourse objects, described through a schematization process emphasizing some aspects of their identity while silencing others, which confers them more or less positive tonality on the basis of cultural pre-constructs (Grize, 2015). It’s worth specifying that the eventual ethos of each person emerging in the interaction does not only rely on one’s effort to present themselves in a specific way, but also on the discursive work of all the participants depending on their own, often diverging, argumentative purpose. Describing the images of Shade and Benoît built in these excerpts allows us to specify the cultural clashes that feed the ‘hushing’ of the Muslim student girl in this dialogue (H3).

results: multi-level cultural clashes that hush the kairos in the Muslim girl’s talk

In this section, we detail our results on the cognitive, affective and social planes regarding H1, H2 and H3. Please note that, due to limits of space, we only reproduce each excerpt’s transcript once, in one or the other of the following subsections, although none of them, as a whole, can be analyzed as solely cognitive, social or affective. This is due to the multifunctionality of language (Bunt, 2011): a single utterance may play several functions, which explains the complex interplay of the three dimensions in dialogic reasoning. Thus, each excerpt intermingles all three dimensions. That said, for the sake of clearly exposing our findings, we will only comment on elements referring to H1 in 4.1, to H2 in 4.2 and to H3 in 4.3.

missing the opportunity to discuss human agency in divine destiny (H1)

Here, we shine a light on the cognitive plane, although the social and affective are present, given the roles played and the expressed emotions. We analyze Shade’s talk to reveal the opportunities that it brings for conceptualizing destiny and we describe teachers’ reactions that prevent them for grasping such kairos and exploiting it for philosophical inquiry. It’s worth mentioning that past studies about this particular videorecording - which was part of a shared corpus analyzed in an interdisciplinary research symposium, have pointed out the great philosophical potential of Shade’s talk. Hers was the most nuanced (Auriac-Slusarczyk, Maire, 2023), and gave relevant examples and arguments, but diverged from the reasoning of one of the teachers (Kohler, 2023). Shade’s contributions provide an opportunity to conciliate the religious conception of destiny with the idea of human agency, traditionally opposed in philosophy (cf. fig. 1), as it is in the ongoing discussion. Up until this point, the teachers had written on the blackboard a first definition of destiny based on what they took from the CPI, as ‘an ineluctable future that is written in advance but that we do not know’. Shade has previously tried to challenge the idea that destiny is ineluctable, at turns 55* and 162*, together with another student, hereafter called Ramon, who mentioned her contribution at turn 69 to develop a similar idea and provides an example of a situation resulting from human action (turn 200). If Ramon seems to have perceived the kairos in Shade’s talk, the teachers did not. When Benoît brings God into the discussion by guiding the students to search for the author of destiny, Shade answers “uh: we know it’s god” (t. 227). Nevertheless, her belief in God is not conceptually contradictory to human agency, and she voices this in general terms: “God […] can write that [the person who had a destiny] can escape from destiny” (t. 493-495). Benoît then shows understanding of her idea and rephrases it as “there is a destiny of destiny” (t. 496). A bit later, however, Shade tries to elaborate her idea with an example, but Benoît acts as if her message was not understandable⁷:

546 — SHA — […] for example we find a five- or ten-euro bill on the ground // so we take it // and in fact we will try to redo ourself with this bill to have even more and to be a bit/a bit more uh :: at ease with our means // financial [means] // to then have a ana / a / clothes we have a house

547 — ABE — i didn’t understand your redo […]

557 — SHA — <it is to say> / it is to say in fact with this bi- / his bill // he will try to do for example to <go up (xx)> i don’t know

558 — RAM — <five euros>

559 —ABE — to increase the sum

560 — SHA — no or multiply <his/ his>

561 — BEN — <yeah> like the little breads and

562 — SHA — here it is // and after in the end he will have a sum // and the total sum he’ll have

563 — BEN — what do you want to tell us exactly

564 — SHA — and uh :: destiny and uh ::

565 — BEN — and uh : <what? >

566 — ABE — there is no [destiny]

567 — SHA — and uh : i forgot {Shade laughs}

Shade’s example is very clear: destiny appears as a combination of what happens to people (finding a bill) and how they behave (using the bill to better their situation). This is consistent with the conceptual map of destiny in school philosophy that we described earlier (cf. fig. 1).

The female teacher, hereafter called Catherine, declared in a self-confrontation interview (c.f. Clot, 2005 for an earlier description of this technique) conducted a posteriori using the videorecord as a stimulus to help her explain her behavior, that she was willing to discuss freedom and realized that the students first needed to define destiny (Kebir et al., 2023). Such improvisation leads her colleague to bring God into the discussion. But the teachers then guide the students towards a definition of ‘believing’ as “thinking that something is true without having any proof of it” (t. 717-719), which ends up with Shade arguing to prove the existence of God (t. 731), and she attempts to engage a metaphysical debate:

743 — SHA — […] who created the earth who created the water who created uh ::: the :: // the vegetation that’s it ? // the vegetation for you it’s who who uh :: // it’s a man // is it

744 — ABE — for me it’s other men // they are not on earth but

745 — SHA — you believe they are aliens ? {Shade laughs}[…]

752 — ELI — <was uh :: // was> created it’s uh : thanks to the big bang // then after uh : it’s uh :: […] science that did the job // we / we / we were / we were / it’s very little / they are bacterias that a / uh : that evolved // it’s / it’s until becoming uh : now […]

766 — RAM — who created the big bang then // maybe if it’s true (xxx) all by itself

767 — DAN — euh: it came about all by <itself>

768 — SHA — <ha::> there you go […]

773 — BEN — <non> but wait // here you are already going too far because we are :: // we come back to the definition //

H1 is validated: Shade’s contributions bring relevant insights with the potential to renew the ongoing CPI, compatible with canonical philosophical debates. So, why are they not heard as such? While she is winning a metaphysical point here together with Ramon (and reveling in it (t. 768)), Benoît shifts group activity to the school routine of learning a definition, thereby regulating the emotional intensity of the dialogue in a downward fashion (i.e., decreasing it). The students accept that he does this, given his social role as a teacher. We hypothesize that listening to arguments for the existence of God is taboo for him at school, embodying a rigorous, laïcist⁸ posture.

affective clues, kairos identification and participation framework (H2)

In this section, we use a multimodal approach to describe how bodily displays of emotion contribute to the (non-)consideration of Shade’s kairos. That said, cognitive and social aspects are also present in the mix, given the concepts discussed and how the teachers take charge in orienting the discussion and managing it, while faced with its affective aspects. Selected screen captures in table 1 present the body language of Shade and the teachers at key points of the topical sequence on God, together with what the teachers say at this point. Let’s have a look at teachers’ reaction to the first mention of God in the CPI, by Shade:

227 — SHA — uh: we know it’s god

228 — BEN — {pause} uh um : uh um :: {laughter} // that is what/this is what you say

229 — CAT — shhhh so what do you think about it

We here witness how Benoit is taken aback by Shade’s utterance in that he pauses, laughs and stumbles; Catherine also produces an emotive ‘shhhh’ before taking over. However, we can hypothesize that their surprise is indeed limited since ‘God’ was an expected answer regarding classical philosophy (cf. fig. 1). What may disturb the teachers here is Shade’s confident assertion stating her belief that God is the author of destiny as an obvious shared truth that “we know” (t. 227). Displaying surprise here is then an argumentative act, denying an obvious status to such a thesis. Such emotion is then regulated and transformed into a form of skepticism by both teachers. Benoît frames the proposition as a personal opinion still to be proven (pointing at Shade with his nose as on the ‘you’ of ‘this is what you say’, cf. table 1). Catherine overtly questions the extent to which Shade’s proposition reflects a consensus in the class by asking other students what they think.

In the rest of the dialogue, the teachers keep on reacting to Shade’s talk with skepticism. But surprisingly, they do not really give her the floor to elaborate her argument in answer to them. The next time Shade gives her opinion, Catherine orients the exchanges to present it as an irrational belief (t.251-266), without giving Shade space to explain her reasons for believing. Her gesture at asking “why do you say that” (t. 255) is particularly inviting: she moves her two hands towards herself on the ‘you’ (stroke) before opening them back in front of her, expressing the idea that there’s something internal to Shade that drives her wordings (this is consistent with her previous repetitions of “what makes you say”, t. 253-255 ). As the girl tries to argue her position, Catherine interrupts her until another student guesses the ‘correct answer’: “because you believe it” (t. 257). Benoît later refers to Shade as an illustration that destiny implies a belief (t.393-400), even pointing at her with his right arm, also without letting her argue. When Shade brings a supporting example to human agency in destiny, she is interrupted several times (t.563, 565), which impedes her getting to her conclusion. At turn 565, Catherine frowns and stares at her, displaying perplexity. Both teachers then tell her “it’s not very clear” (t.570-571), in contradiction with the ‘principle of generosity’ that interactional linguistics defines as making the effort to understand what the interlocutor means even if ill formulated (Kerbrat-Orecchioni, 2005). Indeed, a prior excerpt shows that they did have all the materials to infer what Shade meant:

493 — SHA — for me the person who / god has written destiny // write that the person / who eh :: // he can write that ::: // that the person

494 — BEN — who had a destiny can

495 — SHA — yes euh : can escape destiny

496 — BEN — so there is a destiny of destiny

{Shade laughs}

497 — CAT — so

498 — BEN — <no> but it’s true it’s possible

Benoît’s interruption at turn 494 may aim at helping Shade find her words, but it can also be understood as an expression of impatience, implicitly blaming her for being too long in formulating her sentence. Still, here the teacher understood her point, and rephrases it in general terms (t.496). But his interrogative tone, together with his disengaged body posture (cf. table 1 where Benoît has his arms and legs crossed, and his back against the chairback) led Shade to interpret his sentence at least as challenging her, at most as making fun of her, and she expresses her discomfort by laughing. Catherine also seems to understand Benoît’s reaction as ironic, as it makes her smile. Then the two teachers look at each other with a conspiratorial gaze. Benoît may try to repair his offense by disambiguating his reaction as sincere (and therefore not ironic): “it’s true” (t.498). Still, Shade’s interpretation is in line with the teachers’ behavior from the moment she mentions God until the end of the discussion and, once again, the sequence closes before she can argue her view.

Benoît expresses his skepticism in particularly offensive ways, gradually leaving his role of a third-party to act as an arguer himself, defending a view opposed to Shade’s. He mocks her reference to the miracle of Jesus feeding thousands with 5 loaves of bread and 3 fish (t. 561), as if her reasoning was based on magic (c.f. § 4.1 for the transcript). Later on, when she confesses not knowing what the Big Bang is, he uses the typical argumentative connector ‘precisely’ to argue in favor of Elias’ rival view:

757 — BEN — precisely // precisely what’s the big bang you don’t know so you would maybe have to know what it is […]

761— BEN — so // <it’s because the earth can/was created // in fact > the big bang is an immense source of energy // that created the universe // and in creating the universe thus created the planets the suns the stars the galaxies and so on

Benoît then voices the definition of Big Bang as an argument belonging to the side opposed to the belief in destiny. Embarrassed by Ramon’s challenge (“who created the big bang”, t.766), he pauses and puts his right hand towards Ramon as a ‘stop’ sign (cf. fig. 3). He then ‘cools down’ the atmosphere by stopping the debate and turning to the school exercise of reading the definition written on the blackboard. This is a typical affective regulation strategy in CPI (Polo & Lund, 2021b), which echoes a tendency of white teachers to refuse to engage in the ‘no go area’ of racism in CPI and rather redirect the line of inquiry “onto more comfortable terrain” (Chetty & Suissa, 2016, p. 14). Such a reaction may explain why Shade’s contributions regarding the existence of God are not recognized. But the ways in which teachers regulate affect (or don’t) cannot alone account for rendering Shade’s ideas about how God interacts with destiny inaudible or unheard (H2 is validated). On the contrary, their skepticism should have opened up room for her to argue. Moreover, Catherine could have grasped parts of her contribution about human agency to guide the students to the concept of freedom that she said she was targeting (Kebir et al., 2023). It’s worth mentioning that the teachers were previously trained to facilitate CPI, that they had been practicing with their students for at least one whole academic year (cf. 3.1). Still, their reaction does not embody the ideal navigation into territory of discomfort that would have driven them both 1) to encourage Shade (‘can you tell me more?’); 2) to carefully listen to her ‘without prejudice’ and 3) to remain sensitive to avoid overwhelming her with the burden to be understood (Chetty & Suissa, 2016). On the contrary, Benoît reacts to Elias’ mention of the Big Bang (t. 752) recognizing it as a kairos, valuing the need for all students to understand what it means, asking him to further define it and rephrasing his definition to make it clear to everyone. In doing so, the teacher proves capable of bouncing off a kairos, while he does not do so with Shade’s proposition.

What about Shade during this interaction? Throughout the dialogue, she does not give up and keeps trying to be heard, even if she is interrupted and teased, sometimes only being able to react with a laugh of discomfort (t.254, 567). Her body language, coupled with reactions to the teachers’ talk shows how she feels increasingly uneasy as her idea of human agency in destiny is hushed. Shade’s recurrent self-touching indicates discomfort, such gesturing being a typical reaction to a stressful situation (Kikuchi & Noriuchi, 2019). Her negative facial expression at turn 400 also shows disappointment as teachers only take up her contribution as an illustration of faith. Finally, her body posture at the end of a long unfruitful attempt to be heard, at turn 565, is very expressive: head against her knees, with crossed legs and open hands in front of her. Such a posture uses a minimum of space as if Shade did not feel legitimate any more in the classroom, or as if she wished to disappear. It both expresses discouragement (metaphorically leaving the battlefield displaying harmless hands) and humiliation or submission (being lower than others, not daring to look at them any more). In this context, when her side makes a point in the debate, leaving Benoît silent for a moment, it sounds like a final revenge, that she welcomes with great enthusiasm, raising her arms (cf. fig. 2) and saying out loud “<ha::> there you go” (t. 768).

Figure 2:
Shade’s body language when she says “ha, there you go” (turn 768).

Figure 3:
Benoît’s body language during turn 768.

Table 1
Shade’s body language expressing rising discomfort (t.228-567).

	t.228	t.255	t.398-400	t. 496	t.565
Teachers’ talk	this is what you say	why do you say that	destiny implies […] a belief	so there is a destiny of destiny	and uh : <what? >
Teachers’ body language
Shade’s body reactions

• Source: Authors.

depiction of the teacher as opposed to the student activating cultural clichés

On the social plane, the ethotic images of Shade and Benoît emerging in the interaction embody some features of commonplace clichés about Muslim students and laic teachers (c.f. Table 2). We refer to cultural clashes, based on these clichés, that exist at the micro, meso, and macros levels. We unpack them first for Shade, and then for Benoît. As with the previous two sections, both cognitive and affective elements are intertwined with the social, which we focus on in this section. Our interpretation is that the aforementioned clichés underly cultural clashes making the student girl’s contributions unheard in this context (H3).

The student girl is associated with ignorance, obscurantism, aggressiveness, but also an ability to progress. At the microlevel, regarding individual culture, Shade presents herself as believing in God (t. 227). Catherine builds on this assertion using Shade as an emblematic illustration of the religious dimension of destiny, as opposed to the idea of self-made destiny (“so you you say // who is it who writes our destiny // it’s us […] <you Shade what do you say>”, t. 247-249). The teachers also characterize her as lacking adequate, clear vocabulary:

551 — SHA — and yes // um :: // in brief so then he tries to you know thingy thingy thingy

552 — BEN — thingy thingy thingy i don’t <like that>

553 — SHA — <so in fact>

554 — BEN — no Shade Shade i am talking seriously // when you speak // you try to put words on the thingymajig thingymabob this this / it’s not possible // otherwise you’re the only one in understanding and we don’t understand you

555 — SHA — well : in fact with the bill he will // how do you say it euh : he’ll redo himself

556 — BEN — and but <it’s not> […]

570 — BEN — it’s not very clear

571 — CAT — it’s not very clear

572 — SHA — i forgot what with all these questions

Shade here appears as unable to word her thinking, which would explain that her contribution cannot be heard. At turn 554, Benoît uses the first-person plural ‘we don’t understand you’, and this makes it seem as if he were the spokesperson for everyone in the class except Shade. This does not only exaggerate the fact that she is voicing a minority viewpoint (she’s not the only Muslim in the class), but it also depicts her, in an implicit way, as not speaking the same (correct) language. Then, in asking her to clarify her talk, Benoît often interrupts her, including when she repeats ‘redo himself’ in order to specify what it means (a colloquial term for recovering lost money), as asked by Abelle (t.545, t. 557). Alternatively, he could have asked whether someone else understood and could rephrase Shade’s idea. Such an attitude would have attributed misunderstanding to the complex dialogic process of intersubjective dialogue, not to Shade’s individual deficit. She also proves incapable of remembering her own idea (t. 567), which is due to these interruptions throughout the interaction (t. 572). In addition, she looks ignorant at asking what the Big Bang is (t. 753), an ignorance emphasized by Benoît (t. 757).

At the meso level, regarding school culture, Shade appears as voluntary to participate, even though speaking very spontaneously, which is contrary to the CPI routine that trains people to reflect before speaking. For instance, she introduces God as an obvious commonsensical notion, while it is not a shared belief (t .227). Regarding CPI culture, she is happy to be in charge of managing the conversational floor, even though she is reprimanded several times for talking without waiting for her turn. According to school culture, she also seems likely to deviate from philosophical reasoning (t. 562-567), even her final ‘victory’ was framed as irrelevant by ‘going too far’ (t. 773). Still, her talk may be useful for the inquiry, but only once reframed by the teachers, as instantiating the religious approach to destiny (left side of fig. 1). In reality, Shade performs her student work very well. She follows teachers’ guidance, notably guessing what they have in mind (t. 227), and she makes a great effort to adapt to their suggestions. She tries to define familiar terms (t. 557), and interestingly switches, in a few minutes, from expressing her view as obvious (t. 227) to situating it as limited to a specific community with a general rephrasing (“if you are of a Muslim religion”, t. 618), and finally arguing it (t. 731-768). Even when Benoît suddenly stops the debate (t. 773), she complies and turns to the definition on the blackboard as he suggests.

At the societal macrolevel, she embodies some aspects of the view of Muslims in the French public debate as provocative in displaying their religious beliefs openly, which is sometimes seen as threatening laicity. This may partly explain the affective reaction of Benoît. When Shade claims that God authors destiny, Benoît insists that her view is not universal (t. 228). Catherine also blames her for using a confrontational style at arguing (t .746), which is consistent with the common ‘posture of revendication’ perceived among North-African students at school (here the religious cliché is intricated with an ethnic one). Despite her ‘incorrect’ attitude, Shade seems to have the final word on the metaphysical debate, together with Ramon (t. 766-768): she may not be part of the majority, but she is not isolated. The teachers also depict her as unable to critically think by herself and fully driven by a naïve, unfounded belief. They also characterize her as lacking adequate, clear vocabulary:

253 — CAT — no // what makes you say the destiny it’s god who writes it // why do you say so // what <makes you say so >

254 — SHA — <because it’s / because it’s he> who decides {she laughs}

255 — CAT — but what makes you < why do you say that>

256 — SHA — <euh he knows>

257 — DAN — <because you believe it>

258 — ABE — there are people who don’t believe

259 — CAT — shhh :::

260 — SHA — euh : because I believe it

261 — CAT — because you believe in god

262 — SHA — yeah

263 — CAT — okay // so that’s why you say that

264 — SHA — yeah

265 — CAT — okay

266 — BEN — okay

Let’s see, in turn, which image of Benoît emerges from this interaction. At the individual micro level, he appears as very literate, mastering vocabulary and knowledge, knowing how to speak and think well. He understands Shade’s colloquial ‘redo himself’, which he knows to be a ‘gambler expression’ (t. 549). He also corrects Elias about what made the world evolve: “it’s not science it’s history” (t. 754). Benoît is a history teacher, after all. He also completes Elias’ definition of the Big Bang (t. 761) (c.f. § 4.2), even though he is not a physics teacher. He initiates most of the causal links in the collective reasoning and draws general conclusions from the discussion (t. 496) as if he already knew the truth. Benoît also embodies a posture of skepticism.

Such use of doubt is typical to the culture of philosophical inquiry, at the meso level, contrary to school culture. Benoît also takes on the role of regulating affect by valuing one of Shade’s contributions when she seems ashamed, pretending that his first reaction, which offended her, was not ironic (t. 498) In addition, he displays openness towards new lines of inquiry. Still, he globally enacts school culture more than CPI culture. He tends to communicate as in a dialogic course, transforming the CPI into the matter of guessing the word that he has in mind (e.g.; ‘God’ for who authors destiny, ‘beliefs’ for what destiny implies). He also manages speech turns, even if such practice contradicts the rule of the CPI as this role had been assigned to Shade. He notably interrupts students very often (t. 552, 554, 556, 561, 563, 565, 757, 773, just for the transcripts reproduced here). He evaluates students’ propositions (t. 266, 498, 570, 773). While this is typical to teacher-student interactions (Mehan, 1979) it is contrary to models of good CPI facilitation practice (Delille et al., 2017, Tozzi, 2009). He picks and chooses student propositions when summarizing the state of the discussion. He also authoritatively changes the discussion focus, by deciding what is in or out of scope (when is mentioning God okay or when doing so goes ‘too far’), or switching from CPI to a traditional school exercise (t. 773). Moreover, he does not use such teacher powers to neutrally guide the students (if such neutrality could be possible). Instead, he himself argues against the religious conception of destiny. Doing so, he performs laicist teaching as engaging in a rationalist argument, in the sense of arguing with someone and guides students to develop a critical view of religion.

In fact, he counter-argues Shade’s discourse partly in an explicit rational way, and partly in a more implicit way, using macrocultural clichés to caricature her. On the rational plane, he challenges Shade by asking her to justify her assertions and questioning them in regards to scientific knowledge. But on the implicit plane, his ethotic strategy leads him to ignore any subtle rational nuance brought by Shade, and even to ironize about her talk (t. 496, 561), thus hushing its value (H3 is validated). Such a behavior illustrates the macrosocial French confrontational rhetorical style, and it defeats the ideal of rational discussion through CPI. At the end, when no answer is given to Ramon’s challenge (“who created the Big Bang?”), it is Shade’s turn to mock Benoît (t. 768) <ha::> there you go […].

discussion and conclusion

After confirming the relevance of the Muslim teenager girl’s contributions (H1 validation), we followed how the teachers make use of several cultural layers of clashes to hush her voice (H3). Table 2 summarizes the caricature of Shade and Benoît’s characters, in binary opposition as their ethos appear in the present dialogue. Our analysis reveals that participants pick up features of cultural layers from different contextual levels to depict themselves and others’ resulting in a stereotypical opposition between Shade and Benoît.

Table 2
Multiple cultural layers of clashes that the interactional ethotic depictions of Shade and Benoît appeal to.

	Benoît	Shade	Common practices
Micro Vocabulary Knowledge Posture	Knowing Expert Scientific Doubt	Believing Colloquial Religious Faith	Searching for general implications
Meso Communication Inquiry Educational view	School Classroom routines Standardized ways of reasoning Deficit model	CPI Spontaneous speaking Innovative exploration of the problem Philosophical aptitude	Switching between school and CPI cultures
Macro Aim of the fight Topic relevance	Laicist Rationalist crusade Refusal to discuss metaphysics	Faith over Science Defending her religion Attempt to argue the existence of God	Polemical style based on irony, interruptions and identity coalitions

• Source: Authors.

It is worth noting that Shade and Benoît nevertheless share a strong common cultural ground including 1) a search for general implications, which characterizes philosophical inquiry; 2) repertories of school and CPI practices (even though they sometimes diverge in choosing when switching from one to another); 3) use of the typical French confrontational rhetorical style. The latter may be understood as belonging to a ‘hidden curriculum’ (Giroux & Penna, 1979): while the teachers ask the students to follow the rules of CPI and argue in a collaborative way, Benoît himself uses a confrontational style that the students learn from this dialogue experience. Shade is reprimanded when acting similarly, which delivers the overall inconsistent pedagogical message to ‘argue as I say, not as I do’. About the latter, and transgressing the CPI discussion rules, Shade imitates Benoît very well (c.f. § 4.1) when interrupting Abelle ironically (t. 745) in a similar way as he previously did to her (t. 561).

Although we demonstrated that the inaudibility of Shade’s ideas about how God relates to destiny could not be explained by inappropriate, though typical, regulation of their surprise by the teachers (H2), affects seem to play a great role here. Benoît, the male teacher, engages in a rationalist fight, arguing against Shade’s religious belief. We hypothesize that his behavior relies on a feeling of responsibility in defending secularism based on an extreme view on school laicité. Does it mean that no CPI nor open discussion on religion - even less on the Islam faith - is possible at the French public school? We do not think so, but we believe that the socio-cultural and historical contexts make this discourse object a ‘no go area’ similarly to racism for white speakers (Chetty & Suissa, 2016). As such, venturing there cannot only be cognitively relevant but also politically subversive. It requires specific caution to care for the most vulnerable students, based on an

awareness of the broader social and political context in which these ideas are situated and the respective positions and experience of the people expressing and engaging with them in the classroom (Chetty & Suissa, 2016, p. 17).

On her side, the young Muslim girl displays many, high, negative emotions at being offensively challenged and caricatured, and at the subtle parts of her argument being obscured (cf. table 1). In the long term, she might develop low self-confidence, get discouraged and gradually give up trying to make her voice heard. Still, a limitation of our data is that they do not allow us to infer that Shade felt that she was being culturally silenced. We would need a posteriori interview with her to assess this. We can only show that teachers, in their interactional work, make use of some cultural elements of the context to hush her voice and that she simultaneously displays negative affective reactions.

Stepping away from this case, such results question education researchers and practitioners more globally, about how to make sure that school dialogues are truly inclusive in multicultural contexts. We recommend three concrete facilitation guidelines:

1. ¹⁾

   appropriate regulation of surprise in the face of kairos that questions our own convictions or privileges, by emphasizing the potential of the contribution to bring new insight into collective reasoning (Polo & Lund, 2021b);

2. ²⁾

   exploratory listening, combining the perspective of ‘exploratory talk’ adapted to controversies (Mercer, 1996, Polo, 2023) with deep listening (Haynes & Murris, 2013), by encouraging the student to ‘tell more’ (Chetty & Suissa, 2016);

3. ³⁾

   avoiding stigmatization of individuals by relying on the dialoguing community, for instance asking others to rephrase a contribution, to search for examples or reasons supporting it.

Recommendation 3 is consistent with the literature on CPI (Tozzi, 2009). Moreover, these questions draw a specific multicultural benefit when used to alleviate minority students’ burden of justifying themselves as predominant views tend to be taken for granted.

In this article, we focused on the Islam/French laicité clash, but participants may, in their interaction, make use of cultural elements relating to other types of clichés such as gender, age, race, class or ethnicity. As intersectional approaches show (Collins & Bilge, 2020), these aspects shape power dynamics in an intertwined way in social interaction. Even the present dialogue could be further analyzed considering some of these aspects together with the religious cliché. Shade’s ethotic aggressiveness echoes the typical accusation of a woman behaving in an ‘hysterical’ way for instance; or her depiction as naive may reflect a prejudice based on age. We hope that, although limited, our study will encourage all the members of the educational community to reflect on their practice with the ideal of reaching full open-mindedness. It’s a matter of cognitive inquiry, affective attitude, and social positioning that would not only avoid hushing minority voices but also deeply enrich democratic life.

Acknowledgements:

We thank Dr. Fournel for proving the data analyzed in this article, originally part of Dr. Fournel’s PhD thesis, of which K. Lund was a co-director, and also analyzed within Fournel & Simon, (Eds.). (2023).

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• 1
  The Ferry laws correspond to the three following laws, for which full original texts are published in the Official Journal of the French Republic, available online on the official website of the law administration or the Senate:
  1) Loi du 16 juin 1881 établissant la gratuité absolue de l’enseignement primaire dans les écoles publiques (https://www.legifrance.gouv.fr/jorf/id/JORFTEXT000000877118/);
  2) Loi du 16 juin 1881 relative aux titres de capacité exigés pour l'enseignement primaire (https://www.senat.fr/evenement/archives/D42/1881cap.pdf);
  3) Loi du 28 mars 1882 portant sur l'organisation de l'enseignement primaire (https://www.legifrance.gouv.fr/loda/id/LEGITEXT000006070887).
• 2
  Still, given that a ‘sociocultural neutral’ human or institution cannot exist, French presidents who embodied this universal ideal have thus far been white men from a culturally Catholic background, whether they have been practicing Catholics or not. In addition, the French school week and calendar are organized around the Christian holy days.
• 3
  Republicanism Recast: How the "Veil Affairs" Transformed French Republican Ideology and Public Discourse (2004-2014), http://hdl.handle.net/1866/19601
• 4
  Official text of the law (in French): https://www.legifrance.gouv.fr/jorf/id/JORFTEXT000000417977
• 5
  The REP policy aims at reducing inequalities and is mainly based on economic criteria, targeting schools with high rates of disadvantaged socio-professional categories of the parents; students with social grants, those living in a disadvantaged district (officially recognized as such by another social policy program), or students who repeat a primary school year. The fact that Northern African immigrants or immigrants’ children tend to be socially disadvantaged explain why they tend to live in these districts and go to REP schools (Fougère et al., 2017).
• 6
  The concepts of argumentative script (Plantin, 2018) and interdiscourse (Amossy, 2009) refer to the preexisting, typical opposed views and corresponding justifications that commonly shape the public debate on a given argumentative question in a cultural community, that the participants to a specific dialogue are likely to be familiar with, might embody or on the contrary, distance themselves from.
• 7
  The conventions used to transcribe all the excerpts are in the Appendix.
• 8
  We propose to keep the French term laïcist as it seems stronger than the anglophone term secular. The reverso on-line dictionary gives the following example usage « Ce laïciste milite pour une école publique sans influence religieuse » This laïcist campaigns for a public school without religious influence. The word milite invites an association with value-laden public demonstrations.
• how to quote this article:
  ABNT:
  Polo, Claire; Lund, Kristine. argue as i say not as i do… when the french laic school teachers hush a muslim student girl’s voice. childhood & philosophy, 22, 1-33. Disponível em:______. Acesso em:______. doi:10.12957/childphilo.2026.93049
  APA:
  Polo, C.; Lund, K. (2026).argue as i say not as i do… when the french laic school teachers hush a muslim student girl’s voice. childhood & philosophy, 22, 1-33. doi:10.12957/childphilo.2026.93049
• Financing:
  The authors are grateful to the ASLAN project (ANR-10-LABX-0081) of the Université de Lyon, for its financial support within the French program "Investments for the Future" operated by the National Research Agency (ANR).
• Ethical approval:
  Legal guardians whose children were filmed and teachers who were filmed signed authorization forms approved by the University of Grenoble-Alpes and the LIDILEM and ICAR research labs.
• Availability of data and material:
  Not applicable.
• Image:
  Not applicable.
• Preprint:
  Not published in preprint repository.
• article submitted to the similarity system

appendix 1 conventions used to transcribe the excerpts presented in the paper

We transcribed our data using the conventions that we detail hereafter. Please not that we also translated them from French as literally as possible, only adapting the authentic dialogue utterances when it was necessary to help an English reader understand them.

• N LOC

  number of the speech turn N followed by the 3 first letters of the speaker’s pseudonym (or FAC for the facilitator)

• : or ::

  elongated or very elongated sound (vowel)

• (xx)

  inaudible segment, with as many x as heard syllables

• {indication}

  para-verbal indications

• [words]

  added words necessary to understand the meaning of the utterance in English.

• [...]

  excerpt cut and not shown for lack of space

• //

  pauses between taking a breath

• the per/ person

  word sketched out and then completed

• he’s go/ coming

  marks unfinished words (person, going) with a / at the end of the word

• ?

  marks a question

Edited by

• editors
  rose-anne reynolds
  https://orcid.org/0000-0002-0775-3318
  jonathan wurtz
  https://orcid.org/0009-0000-7930-9227

Data availability

Not applicable.

Publication Dates

• Publication in this collection
  08 May 2026
• Date of issue
  2026

History

• Received
  22 June 2025
• Accepted
  23 Feb 2026
• Published
  28 Feb 2026