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

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