Discourse & Communication http://dcm.sagepub.com/
Speaking out in public: citizen participation in contentious school board meetings Karen Tracy and Margaret Durfy DISCOURSE & COMMUNICATION 2007 1: 223 DOI: 10.1177/1750481307076008 The online version of this article can be found at: http://dcm.sagepub.com/content/1/2/223
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ARTICLE
Tracy and Durfy: Speaking out in public 223
Speaking out in public: citizen participation in contentious school board meetings
KAREN TRACY U N IVERSITY OF COLORADO
MARGARET DURFY
Discourse & Communication Copyright © 2007 SAGE Publications. (Los Angeles, London, New Delhi and Singapore) www.sagepublications.com Vol 1(2): 223–249 10.1177/1750481307076008
U N IVERSITY OF COLORADO
A B S T R A C T A high level of citizen involvement in civic life is presumed crucial to the well-being of democracy, but the actual discourse of citizen involvement has rarely been analyzed. This article analyzes citizen participation in the school board meetings of one US community that was in the midst of conflict. After providing background on education governance practices and the community that was studied, citizen participation is examined. Citizen commentaries at school board meetings are shown to be a distinct speech genre and the genre is described. Then, we characterize the discourse practices used to express negative sentiment. Feeling-limned description, avowal of feelings, rhetorical questions, reported speech, use of god and devil terms, and using meeting rules as weapons were the main negative sentiment strategies. In the conclusion we suggest when low levels of citizen involvement should be acceptable, and why ‘reasonable hostility’ is a desirable form of citizen expression. KEY WORDS:
citizen discourse, democracy, emotional expression, public participation, reasonable hostility, school board meetings
In Democracy in America, the aristocratic French traveler Alexis de Tocqueville (1835/2003) said, ‘It is in mandates relating to public education that, from the outset, the original character of the American civilization is revealed in the clearest light’ (p. 53). It is ‘by entrusting citizens with the management of minor affairs’, he went on to note, ‘much more than by handing over control of great matters, that their involvement in the public welfare is aroused and their constant need of each other to provide for it is brought to their attention’ (p. 593). Quoting de Tocqueville is a well-established tradition in US political writing and speech (Kramnick, 2003); doing so cues that authors will be developing claims about how some activity in US society expresses, cultivates, or endangers democracy. Such is our aim in this article. In this study we examine how one US community
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managed the ‘minor affair’ of governing their public schools during a time of community disagreement about its public schools. We focus on the speeches that this community’s citizens gave during the public participation phases of school board meetings, considering particularly the role of negative sentiment and dissent. At the article’s end, we suggest what this case study of citizen participation in local governance tells us about democracy in the United States. Although speeches of visible political leaders have been a major focus of communication scholarship, attention has rarely been directed to citizens speaking in local public meetings about ‘minor affairs’. Given how frequently political theorists wax eloquent about the importance of participation in ordinary civic life (e.g. Barber, 1984; Putnam, 2000), this inattention is troubling. To judge it problematic that fewer people are participating in school board meetings and other arenas of civic life would seem to rest on having a clear understanding of what people typically do in these settings. Exactly how are citizens talking and toward what end is their speech directed? We need an understanding of what participation looks like when many citizens are attending public meetings and speaking out if we are to render a grounded judgment about civic life’s well-being or decline. The article begins by reviewing several strands of research about citizen participation in local settings. Then we describe the study’s materials and provide background on the events that produced the contention. Our analysis of citizens speaking out operates at three levels. The first and widest perspective identifies patterns of citizen participation across a three-year time period. Then, we zoom in to examine three consecutive meetings that included 101 citizen speakers, showing how through the topics citizens selected, as well as how they opened, closed, and delivered remarks, a distinctive genre was created: the school board speech. Finally, we take a close look at selected citizen speeches to characterize the routine ways negative sentiment was expressed, arguing that the strategies citizens used comprised what should be thought of as ‘reasonable hostility’, a type of angry expression directed at officials that is essential in a wellfunctioning, democratic body. In the conclusion, we step back from the case to draw out broader implications for citizenship.
Research on citizen participation PUBLIC HEARINGS AND TOWN MEETINGS
Although philosophers (e.g. Habermas, 1984; Rawls, 1971; Young, 2000), communication scholars (e.g. Asen, 2004; Gastil, 2000; Hicks, 2002) and political scientists (e.g. Barber, 1984; Dryzek, 1990) have had a lot to say about what ideal citizen participation should look like or what it will accomplish, there is only a small body of work studying how people feel about their participation in public meetings, and even fewer studies examining participation directly. One site in which citizen participation has been investigated is public hearings focused on particular environmental risks. McComas (2001, 2003), for instance, used surveys and in-depth interviews to explore how US citizens
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and public officials felt about their participation in public meetings, and found that, by and large, officials were more pleased than were citizens. A recent volume (Bora and Hausendorf, 2006) examined the discourse of several public meetings in Germany and the Netherlands that considered emerging policies related to genetically modified organisms. Citizenship, the volume editors argue, is ‘empirically constituted within the interaction between government and citizens’ (p. 85). Drawing on a series of distinctive discursive frames, including an Austin-based speech act application (Sbisa, 2006), a Sacks-guided membership categorization analysis (Ivanyi et al., 2006; Padmos et al., 2006) and a Goffman-grounded exploration of reported speech (Holsanova, 2006), the authors make visible just how citizenship is constructed through the particular talk moves of experts, politicians, and ordinary citizens. Studies of citizen participation in public hearings, although much needed, are not easily applicable to citizen participation in local governance meetings. Unlike public hearings which are focused on consideration of a single issue, coming into existence for the sole purpose of discussing that issue and almost always occurring no more than a few times, local governance meeting are regularly recurring events that involve standing categories of people (e.g. elected officials, teachers and school administrators, parents and other citizens) to make decisions about a wide swath of resource-allocation and symbolic issues. These meeting differences are important: participants frequently have ongoing relationships with each other – they are not just unknown ‘authorities’ and ‘public audiences’ – and what can be talked about in local governance meetings is quite topically varied. More similar in format to the education governance meetings that are this article’s focus are studies of town meetings. Town meetings, a form of direct democracy in which citizens in a community come together, typically once a year, involve citizens talking about issues that matter to them and then voting. Largely restricted to small US towns in New England, these increasingly uncommon kinds of meetings, nonetheless, have been given serious scholarly attention. Mansbridge’s (1980) ethnographic study of the 500-person town of Selby, Vermont is the classic study that anchors this line. More recent works by Bryan (1999, 2004) and also Zimmerman (1999) begin to flesh out different features of citizen participation. We know for instance that more men than women attend and speak out, that when the agenda has issues about schools, more citizens attend and women are more likely to speak, that meetings held in the day ran longer than night ones, but they also had more people speaking for closer to equal amounts of time (Bryan, 2004). Meeting talk itself, Bryan asserted, could turn an apparently ‘cut and dried’ issue into a ‘drawn out discussion’ (p. 247); he did not, however, show how drawn-out discussions unfolded discursively. Town meetings are structurally similar to school board meetings, with many of them even including school matters on their agendas. Their (usually) direct democracy format, however, creates a different frame for understanding participants’ speech. At least nominally, all who show up at a town meeting are equally entitled to talk and to cast a vote at the conclusion of the group’s
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discussion. Although all citizens, as Bryan (2004) shows, do not exercise these ‘equal’ rights, nonetheless, they do possess them. This equality is not even nominally the case in representative forms of governance. School board and city council governance formats give elected officials the right to vote, with citizen input restricted to speaking at meetings (or on the telephone or in emails). Citizen words may shape how elected officials frame issues and vote, but, if we take citizen perception in surveys as a gauge (Farkas et al., 2001), citizen words are often ignored. US SCHOOL BOARD MEETINGS
Unlike most western countries in which policies about education are set nationally, with educational experts responsible for making decisions, education in the United States gives ordinary citizens in their local governance bodies a significant role. To be fair, American school governance does give an important role to educational experts, and district policies are shaped, and increasingly so, by federal initiatives. But school governance remains very much an important local matter. A whole host of decisions about the content, structure, and funding of education are made at the local level. Educational governance practices in the US were shaped by progressive thinkers in the early years of the 20th century. Progressives argued that creating and maintaining good schools was an apolitical, non-partisan issue. School governance was to be a matter of elected officials listening to their citizens, talking with each other, and then determining the community’s common good. But in the 1950s as US schools began to deal with racial desegregation, the view that education was or could be non-political began to disappear. Today, in the first decade of the 21st century, no one would assert that education is an apolitical matter. Yet even as education is recognized as an adversarial arena that is deeply political, unitary views of democracy linger, continuing to shape the conduct of school governance. School board meetings can be dull affairs, but they also are regular sites for the playing out of especially heated conflict. Because of obvious and immediate consequences for citizens’ own children and grandchildren, talk often gets emotional. Particular conflicts may be about money and which groups of students will get what; they may be about symbolic issues related to fairness and equity, academic excellence, or what is moral and right; or, as is often the case, the material and symbolic issues may be deeply intertwined. Yet, although it is commonplace in US society for school board meetings to be sites for heated conflict (Howell, 2005), we have little sense of what these educational governance conflicts look like discursively. The exact structure and makeup of US school boards and how they link with other units of local governance vary enormously. Some boards are dependent on their community’s city council to approve budgets and bond initiatives; others operate autonomously, forwarding tax initiatives as they see fit. Although the variety of governance structures is large, there is one format that is especially common. The most typical structure is one in which a small set of officials, usually about seven, are elected through at-large, non-partisan elections, and serve voluntarily rather than for pay (Briffault, 2005; Hess, 2002). These elected
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officials meet regularly in public where they discuss and do the district’s business. Usually sunshine laws restrict the kinds of meetings that can occur among elected officials outside of public view. In addition, just about all school boards will have time set aside in their public meetings for citizen input. In a large scale survey, school board members reported a high degree of skepticism about citizens’ motives for participating in meetings, seeing their main purpose as ‘to gripe’. At the same time, ‘a majority of board members rely on these meetings to understand the views of community residents relating to the public schools’ (Farkas et al., 2001: 27).
BVSD board meetings, the materials, and methods This study is part of a larger project (Tracy, forthcoming) examining one community’s school board meetings. Previous studies have: (1) analyzed the interactional sensitivities in the public discussion that followed the removal of a thirdgrader’s science fair project that asked elementary students for judgments about race and attractiveness (Tracy et al., in press); (2) considered how the district named and framed the communication troubles it saw itself as having (Tracy and Muller, 2001); (3) examined how citizens and elected officials argued over the significance of document language the board was developing to enact the district policy toward gay students and staff (Tracy and Ashcraft, 2001); (4) identified strategies board members used to problematize fellow board members’ conduct (Tracy and Standerfer, 2003); and (5) considered why argument language (e.g. issue, claim, reason) was virtually absent in school board meetings even as speakers took different positions and debated (Craig and Tracy, 2005). The larger project is based on 63 public meetings that occurred between April 1996 and February 1999. The 35-month time frame, an especially contentious one in the district, includes two different set of elected officials. Meetings were well-attended and long during this time; an average meeting ran 4.6 hours and had 17.4 citizen speakers. Meetings frequently were packed (100+ in attendance at the meeting’s start) and during this time local newspapers ran weekly, if not daily stories, editorials, and letters about school district troubles and conflicts. Less than 10 percent of the meetings during this period had three or fewer citizen speakers. This high level of citizen involvement (and contention) is a clear contrast with the school district’s current scene. During the 2005–6 academic year, the average number of citizen speakers was 7.5 and 47 percent of the year’s meetings had three or fewer speakers.1 The board meetings that are this project’s focus come from Boulder Valley School District (BVSD), a 25,000-student district in the western United States that includes nine different communities, more than 50 schools, and roughly a quarter of a million people. The BVSD board governs a financially autonomous local school district and includes seven members who are elected through atlarge, non-partisan elections. Meetings occur twice a month and are broadcast over a local cable channel. The primary materials for the project include audio- or videotapes of the publicly broadcast meetings, with roughly 60 hours transcribed.
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Transcripts were kept simple: words, repetitions, and vocal repairs were recorded. Punctuation was added to aid readability rather than being used to capture intonation. As transcription is always a theoretical activity (Ochs, 1979) we opted for a simple level as our interest was in argument strategies and discursive moves. In addition to the discourse data, interviews were conducted with key participants, newspaper coverage logged, and the minutes collected from all meetings. For this study, we focus analysis on one moment in the 35 months that had an especially large turn out – the last three meetings of the 1997 school year. Among the main issues up for discussion in this three-meeting time period were: (1) approval of the next year’s budget in which there were several proposed cuts directed toward programs involving ‘at-risk’ youth; (2) the contract termination of a popular athletic high school coach; (3) a controversy about the meaning of standardized reading tests results that implicated elementary teachers’ teaching competence; and (4) the appointment of a new superintendent, the chief administrator of the school district, whose background was in the military rather than in education. These three meetings concluded a school year that had had many contentious moments. At the time the meetings occurred, a community group was already actively campaigning to defeat the board president and the two other incumbents who were running for re-election in November. That election was to set a community record for voter participation in school board elections. For the focal three meetings, we analyzed the tapes and transcribed speeches of the 101 citizen speakers.2 Our analysis combines simple quantitative coding of descriptive-level speech features (e.g. how did the speaker self-identify in the opening moments? Did the bell that limited speaking time go off? How long was the speech? Did the speaker read a prepared statement or speak extemporaneously?), with discourse analysis of selected speeches. In analyzing the speeches, we focused on characterizing how speakers were criticizing, disagreeing, and expressing outrage. Finally, to develop the big picture view of citizen participation across time, we examined meeting minutes to see how many men and women spoke in each meeting and whether their participation occurred during the opening phase or later in the meeting as each agenda item was taken up.3 We were interested in whether men or women spoke more because folk logic could generate opposite predictions. On the one hand, women could be expected to talk more because school governance involves children and women might be expected to be more concerned. On the other hand, speaking out in public meetings, whatever their type, is an activity that men are expected to do more often than women. Our broad picture analysis sought to identify the relative frequency of male and female speakers in school board meetings. At BVSD board meetings, the seven elected officials sat at an elevated dais, with the school superintendent and the school district attorney at a table on one side, and the board secretary on the other. The secretary’s job was to take minutes and ring a bell if speakers exceeded the officially announced two-minute time limit. A podium with a microphone faced the board members, and it was here that citizens would speak. Following a roll call of board members and the group’s
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reciting of the pledge of allegiance, up to 25 speakers could address the board on any issue they wanted to raise, as long as it was not on that day’s meeting agenda. If citizens wanted to speak on an agenda topic, they were expected to wait until that agenda item came up for discussion. At that point, up to 10 people could speak. If there were more than 10 people who wanted to speak, a count of additional people and whether they were pro or con was noted. At the start of public participation, the board president would explain the above rules and then read a statement about the kind of communicative conduct that was expected. The exact statement varied slightly; below is one version. Excerpt 1 (22 May 1997, line 34) ((Reading voice)) We are glad to hear from the public and we look forward to receiving your comments. The Board has unanimously resolved, however, that it cannot tolerate personal attacks upon Board members, administrators, teachers, or staff. ((murmurs from audience – change to speaking voice)) We will also expect the audience to be extremely quiet during this discussion because this is actually an official board meeting and we need to conduct business. ((Return to reading voice)) We must all encourage and insist upon a more civil public discourse and we thank you for helping us to achieve that goal.
Following the explanation of participation rules, speakers were called to the podium in groups of five. Each would take their presumably two-minute turn and sit down, and the president would call the names of the next five speakers. Participation rules were not straightforwardly followed; later we show how citizens challenged the conduct rule and used it as a resource to express negative sentiment.
BVSD citizen participation 35- MONTH PICTURE : WHO TALKS AND WHEN Across the 35-month time period that spanned two board leaderships and 63 meetings, the number of citizens who spoke at a meeting varied considerably, from a meeting with two speakers to one with 43. Figure 1 charts the participation chronologically across the 35-month time period; Table 1 provides a participation profile by each of the two board leaderships. Citizen involvement in BVSD school board meetings ebbed and flowed. To the degree that a generalization can be offered, there is a weak link to the rhythms of community–family life. In two of the three years, the meetings with the fewest speakers occurred at the start of the school year (August, September) and immediately after the Winter holidays (January). In the 1998–9 year, however, this was not the case. The August 1998 meetings followed a newspaper article that highlighted charges of racism in the schools, and a goodly number of students, teachers, and community leaders turned out at that year’s opening meetings to comment about district policies about fairness related to race and sexual orientation. The January 1999 meetings of that school year, likewise, brought lots of citizens out to argue for and against ‘valuing’ diversity (i.e. sexual orientation) THE
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citizen speakers (April 1996 to February 1999)
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FIGURE 1. Number of
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Tracy and Durfy: Speaking out in public 231 TA B L E
1 . BVSD meeting data overview Hult board (April 1996 to October 1997)
Number of public meetings 35 Average meeting length 5.0 hrs Range 1.33 hrs to 7.08 hrs Average number of speakers at start 10.5 Range 0 to 29 Average number of speakers on agenda items 8.9 Range 1 to 20 Average total number of citizen speakers 19.4 Range 2 to 43
Shoemaker board (November 1997 to February 1999) 28 4.1 hrs .5 hrs to 5.92 hrs 9.2 0 to 24 6.3 0 to 16 15.5 2 to 36
as the board closed its five months of discussion and finalized its policy for a vote (Tracy and Ashcraft, 2001). A more accurate generalization, then, would be that participation at BVSD school board meetings was event-driven, with the time of year having a weak effect on whether something became ‘an event’. Of note, there was a strong relationship between the number of citizens speaking at a meeting and a meeting’s length (r = .60, d.f. = 61, p < .001). It was also the case that more citizens spoke at the start of meetings (Average = 9.9) on presumably ‘non-agenda’ topics than later in the meeting when the board was voting on or discussing a specific agenda items (Average = 7.6). These numbers are misleading, however, as it was quite common for speakers in the opening phase to speak about an upcoming agenda item. For instance, in the meeting where discussion and voting of the next year’s budget was an agenda item, parents, students, and teachers from schools that were likely to be affected by proposed cuts (or failures to increase funding) spoke at the meeting start, rather than when the meeting arrived at discussion of the budget item, with speakers making a case for how good/effective/important their particular school program was. Higher participation levels at the beginning of meetings seemed related to citizens wanting to have their say and then be able to leave the meetings, rather than to the agenda/non-agenda status of their topic. At a later time period, in fact, the BVSD board changed its participation rules so citizens could speak at the meeting’s start on both agenda and non-agenda items. Women are in a ‘minority status in the halls of governance’ (p. 189); so proclaimed Bryan (2004) based on study of almost 1500 New England town meetings over a more-than-25-year period. Although 46 percent of attendees at the town meetings he studied were women, they comprised only 36 percent of the meeting speakers. In addition, women speakers made briefer remarks than male participants. In BVSD school board meetings, this was not the case. The citizens who participated in the school board meetings were predominately female. Across the 35-month time period, 61 percent were female and 39 percent were male. Although typical meetings had more female speakers, in 24 percent
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of them there were equal or greater numbers of male speakers. Inspection of minutes suggested no obvious features that distinguished meetings with greater numbers of male speakers, with the exception that a few of these high-maleparticipation meetings focused on topics that specifically affected boys’ education (e.g. the dismissal of a boy’s basketball coach; whether a vocational education program was to be dropped). THE THREE - MEETING PORTRAIT : THE GENRE OF CITIZEN SCHOOL BOARD REMARKS
In characterizing citizens’ remarks as a specific ‘discourse genre’ (Swales, 1990), a notion quite similar to Hymes’s (1974) idea of a speech event, we draw attention to the fact that this oral activity included identifiable, sequentially organized discourse moves taken by particular categories of people in a specific institutional setting for a describable purpose. At the most general level, citizen remarks are best described as the non-interactive genre of a ‘speech’. Seventy-six percent of the time citizens sat down as soon as they finished speaking, with no board commentary or back-and-forth exchange. In addition, citizen remarks were short, albeit not as short as the meeting rule specified. The average length of these ‘twominute’ speeches was 132 seconds, with the longest speech running just shy of five minutes (maximum length = 281 seconds) (see Tables 4 and 5). In openings, citizens typically did two things: (1) they identified themselves by name and (2) they explicitly classified themselves by membership terms that underscored their right to be heard (Sacks, 1992). Excerpts 2 and 3 give examples of typical openings. Excerpt 2 (26 June 1997, Line 70) Good evening, I am Randy Szarmack. I’ve been a resident of the Boulder Valley School District for over 25 years. I have two children. I’ve had two children at Boulder High School and two more yet to attend. My oldest son will be a junior this fall. Excerpt 3 (22 May 1997, Line 97) My name is Annette Crawford. Ladies and gentlemen of the board I am here tonight to represent the Baobab Community high school parent council. The termination of the Baobab charter contract is very distressing.
The two moves were not always present, but as Table 2 shows, they usually were; 85.1 percent identified by name and 82.2 percent used one or more membership term. When one looks at the speeches of those who did not mention their name, two reasons become apparent. A first is the obviousness of who must be speaking given how the president had listed the people to line up at the podium. Several times, for instance, there was only a single speaker called, or the president concluded listing the five upcoming speakers by repeating the first speaker’s name. A second reason had to do with the visibility of the speaker. The president of the teacher’s union, who spoke at most meetings, rarely introduced himself; he just began speaking. His absence of identification – and no board member calling him on it – supported his identity as a school board regular whom everyone knew.
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Tracy and Durfy: Speaking out in public 233 TA B L E
2. Speech openings Percentage
Speaker identified by name Speaker identified by membership terms (1 or more) Town/area resident Parent Group representative Ethnicity/gender/sexual orientation Occupation Teacher Student Other
85.1 82.2 26.7 34.7 15.8 0 38.7 28.7 5 5
N = 101.
With regard to speakers who did not use membership terms to describe themselves, it should be noted that we coded conservatively, looking for straightforward labels. Speakers who mentioned their work (as can be seen in Excerpt 9) without self-labeling were not counted. With a more liberal coding, just about every speaker would be seen as at least invoking a membership term. In these three meetings, though, no speaker explicitly self-identified in terms of ethnicity, race, or sexual orientation. Speakers at other BVSD meetings have used these category labels (Haspel and Tracy, in press; Tracy and Ashcraft, 2001), but they did so when discussing the district’s diversity policy or in assessing whether the district was racist. Table 3 provides an overview of the percent of citizens who spoke about the different topics that became focal in these three meetings. Of note, roughly half (47.5%) of citizen commentaries tied to a specific school whereas the other half tied to the school district more generally. School-specific comments tapped into issues that affected smaller set of families in the district. In that sense, schoolspecific issues typically touched citizens personally and directly. With the exception of student speakers, however, citizens rarely argued for what they favored (or were against) using only self-focused reasons; instead, they worked to cast their concern about a school issue or a program as a larger communitylevel, public issue. Excerpt 4 gives an example of the kind of self-focused argument that was rare. Excerpt 5 illustrates a more typical argument justification. Excerpt 4 (22 May 1997, Line 422) Hello I’m Chantal Barron and I’m here on the Baobab subject. Uh Baobab is my last chance to get an education before I have to go into society. And if it doesn’t open then this was my last chance at education. And I’ll have to go into the world at 15 and get a full time job. And just being nobody for the rest of my life. Excerpt 5 (22 May 1997, Line 285)4 My name is PJ Ernic and I’m here to request that the board approve a contract amendment to extend the deadline for site approval and submission of the budget to Baobab … It is your duty to provide a quality education for every student in the district;
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3. Topical foci and delivery style
Speech topics
Percent
Basketball coach Superintendent search/decision District budget Reading scores/reading curriculum A specific school School board conduct Negative assessment of conduct Praise of conduct Speech delivery style Impromptu/extemporaneous Read
16.8 10.9 12.9 21.8 47.5 32.7 84.8 15.2 31.7 68.3
Note: N = 101; speeches could include more than one topic. not just those easily shuffled through the massive and impersonal halls of our high schools. Helping Baobab in September is a way for you to fulfill that … Our community needs this school if it is to help at-risk teens prosper.
Evidencing the contentiousness of the meetings, close to a third (32.7%) of citizen speeches made comments about one or another school board member’s conduct, with the vast majority of the comments being negative (84.8%). In addition, we assessed the style of speech delivery in terms of whether it was read or delivered extemporaneously. What was notable was that the vast majority (68.3%) of speeches were read, with little or no adaptation to what earlier speakers said. The absence of conversational adaptation – where it would be expected in an ordinary discussion – was one way that ‘reading’ became visible to us. That citizens did not deviate from their written texts is understandable given the stress of speaking in public; nonetheless it does underscore the noninteractive nature of the meeting talk. This non-interactivity is largely a negative feature of the meetings, but we would note a positive side. In an analysis of British parliament debates, Harris (2001) identified stylized ways speakers were ‘impolite’ that diffused the face threat of what was being said. We would draw a similar analogy to reading. By ‘reading’ speakers frame their comments as written, thereby making relevant evaluative frames that are used to assess writing. Pointed, negative expression, we suggest, is acceptable if not favored in written genres such as letters to the editor. Reading enables a more intense personalized confrontation than would be expected (and probably would be seen) in discussion-oriented meetings; at the same time, reading makes visible that remarks are planned in advance, not uncontrolled outbursts, and thereby partly tames their negativity. Speeches did not typically have a concluding section (Table 4) that forecasted that the end was near. Instead, the most common way speakers displayed that they were finished was to utter the phrase, ‘thank you’ and move away from the podium. Most often the meeting chair reciprocated the thank you; in fact, the chair
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Tracy and Durfy: Speaking out in public 235 TA B L E
4. Speech endings
Citizen uses ‘Thank You’ Board chair reciprocates ‘Thanks’ Board member response Bell rings during ending
71 66 25 36
Note. N =101. TA B L E
5. Getting ‘belled’
Number of bells None One Two
Speech length (seconds) N
M
F
Average
Minimum
Maximum
65 34 2
27 15 2
38 19 0
105 182 182
29 132 179
247 281 185
thanked speakers following all but seven percent of the speeches. That ‘thank you’ was a speech-ending marker rather than being an expression of appreciation, was particularly obvious when it occurred in a speech of pointed criticism: Excerpt 6 (22 May 1997, Line 505) The contributors to School Links [district newsletter] think that the public should question the intentions behind the release of manipulated information which creates panic. Thank you. ((audience applause))
On average, speeches were slightly longer than the officially prescribed twominute length. A bell would sometimes be rung in order to alert speakers that they had exceeded their time. What is especially interesting is the large variation in lengths among speeches with no bells, one, or two. Some of the longest speeches, often by middle or high school students, had no bell rung. At least in terms of seconds speaking, the bell’s ringing was hard to predict. Factors that seemed to affect it not ringing were, most obviously, a speaker’s student status, and secondly, if the words of a speech cued that the speaker was approaching its end. Inspection of Table 5 also suggests a slight tendency to bell male speakers (39%) more than female ones (33%). As we know that women (average = 2:16) spoke slightly longer than men (average = 2:08), this difference would suggest that the bell-ringer was applying different standards depending on whether the speaker was a child, a woman, or a man. Consider what was said by the district staff person responsible for bell-ringing in an interview that occurred a few years after this 35-month time period. Excerpt 7 (Interview with DS, BVSD staff responsible for ringing bell, 2 May 2000) KT: My impression, and I haven’t timed this, is that uh just hearing the bell thatthat it was um inconsistently two minutes. DS: Well it- yes, it is inconsistently two minutes. KT: Could you, I mean how- how do you (pause) DS: We’re, we just
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236 Discourse & Communication 1(2) KT: DS: KT: DS: KT: DS: KT: DS:
decide about ringing the bell? We do- do, I don’t do the bell anymore. Anymore. When you were doing it backWe did it back then. Then yeah? For when Stephanie [board president] asked me to do it. Yeah. So, she would just kinda nod at me when it was time to ring the bell ((laugh)).
Enforcing time limits is delicate business especially if the system is not mechanical (e.g. red, yellow, and green lights that all can see and that change automatically). That bells did not go off when students were speaking – regardless of how long they spoke – supports this interpretation. To enforce strict limits on young, novice speakers seems harsh; the board did not do this. Instead, the president judged when a speaker was ‘over time’, thereby making the two-minute unit of time a social reality that had to be negotiated, rather than a brute fact. We make no claim that what we see in these three 1997 BVSD meetings is how school board speeches typically unfold. We expect that the exact shape of citizen speeches will be affected by its school board rules, as well as by how the leaders enforce the rules, the degree of contention in a community, and by the habits of speech (i.e. what is or isn’t said in introducing self) that become common in a community. Even recognizing these likely variations, however, a close look at this one community has given flesh to the basic portrait of citizen discourse. In the next section we describe how negative sentiment was expressed by BVSD citizens. CITIZEN STRATEGIES FOR EXPRESSING DISAGREEMENT , CRITICISM , AND OUTRAGE
Feeling-limned description A typical speech argued for or against expected upcoming actions, or occasionally, actions that had already been taken. Citizens’ proposals about what should/ should not happen were usually grounded in and intermingled with descriptions of scenes and people’s actions. These descriptions regularly ‘widened the circumference of the scene’ (Townsend, 2006) to show what issue of community good was at stake; descriptions also were edged with feelings (i.e. feeling-limned) and were rarely neutral. As Edwards and Potter (1992) found commonplace in situations of dispute, descriptions were ‘organized to undermine or reject an alternative’ (p. 3). Descriptions drew on a range of speech act naming and linguistic formulation practices that convey speakers’ feelings (Besnier, 1990; Tracy, 2006). Consider just three cases. In Excerpt 8 the speaker is a teacher at one of the high schools where a staff cut is being considered in the next budget cycle. After introducing himself, he says the following: Excerpt 8 (22 May 1997, Line 349) We find ourselves working to succeed in what we perceive to be an increasingly hostile environment. We hear comments at board meetings, and work sessions that ridicule our course offerings, make jokes about closing us down, that claim we receive excessive fundings to accomplish our goals.
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His description offers a sense of a dysfunctional leadership by naming the board’s speech acts as ‘ridiculing’ and ‘joking’, and by characterizing the work environment as ‘hostile’. In addition, he describes the board’s reasons for cuts using skepticism markers (i.e. saying ‘that claim’) (Pomerantz, 1989/90). A second example is seen in the speech of an ‘international management consultant’. The speaker selected the membership term for himself, thereby licensing his ability to pronounce on technical matters. He then went on to criticize board actions by describing their interpretation of a recently publicized reading test. By using powerful descriptors that frame the board’s interpretation of test results as completely off-base, not something that could be debated, he makes clear his strong negative assessment. Excerpt 9 (22 May 1997, Line 1629) Good evening. My name is Stuart Osteen. I live in Boulder and I’m a parent. I’m here tonight to express my concern over the dangerous misuse of reading statistics. I’ve had the good fortune to spend the last sixteen years as an international management consultant helping some of the world’s largest organizations improve business performance by improvi- improving employees. As you might expect, this involves gathering and interpreting a lot of data and subjecting it to rigorous statistical analysis. By any responsible informed statistical interpretation the current uproar over fourth grade reading scores is unjustified, even silly. And judging by the comments in the Camera [the local newspaper] it reveals a frightening ignorance about statistics on this board.
A third example of feeling-limned description is seen in the speech of the president of the teacher’s union. Of note, the teacher’s union president is criticizing not merely a single action but the board’s decision-making capacity. Through listing diverse non-responsive actions of the board – not listening, intimidating, using disrespectful language (educrats) – the BVSD president raises a criticism of basic board leadership. Excerpt 10 (22 May 1997, Line 1997) … When President Clinton talked about education being his number one priority in his State of the Union Address this January, he spoke about the constant attacks our public schools and our teachers were under … I agree with the President, so I’m very concerned about the state of our school district. The public needs to know that teachers do not feel listened to by members of this school board. The public needs to know that some members of this school board routinely refer to professional educators as educrats. The public needs to know that intimidation of administrators in our school district is perceived to be prevalent. The public needs to know that there has been inappropriate involvement in personnel decisions by a school board member in recent weeks in this school district.
Avowal of feelings Expressing negative feelings through a selected ‘description’ was a widespread and pervasive practice for conveying outrage. It was also the case, although not quite as common, for speakers to explicitly announce negative feelings that they were experiencing. Buttny (1993) labels this speech act, ‘avowal of affect’ and describes its purpose this way: ‘by avowing negative emotions, the actor implicates his/her
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involvement and affective response to the event as a way to critically assess others’ (p. 90). The president of the teacher’s union announced, ‘We are angry about the misuse of standardized test scores for political reasons’ (22 May 1997, Line 211) and in the middle of a speech arguing that the board should not appoint exmilitary man Segal as the new superintendent, a teacher interjects, ‘I- I’m appalled, I’m hurt, of all the things you’ve done, this has to be the biggest, I’m not kidding you, slap in the face. You don’t honor the teaching profession and we’re proving it’ (26 June 1997, line 1240). Feeling avowals were frequently combined with feeling-limned scene descriptions as can be seen in a parent’s announcement of her ‘surprise’ triggered by the action described as a ‘PhD in education … misunderstand[ing]’ a test’s meaning. In this case the board president engaged in the relatively rare action of framing the speaker as violating the expected meeting rule of speaking in a civil style. Excerpt 11 (22 May 1997, Line 625) Parent:
I am surprised that scho- school board members including one with a PhD in education would un- misunderstand ((audience applause)) the [purpose of this test
Pres:
[Just a moment, just a moment, no personal attacks please [that’s] not appropriate. [Tha-] [Go ahead, Susan. [That’s not personal.
Parent: Pres: Parent:
Less negatively intense, but especially common, were announcements that speakers were feeling ‘concerned’. Being concerned, we suggest, makes visible that speakers possess at least mild negative feelings. Excerpt 12 (Parent, 26 June 1997, Line 446) That’s wh- why- why- I’m here as a parent just- I’m concerned about the- the [students] not getting their credits and they were brought here to this school with the understanding that they would get college credits for certain courses they were taking. Excerpt 13 (Parent, 22 May 1997, Line 422) You’ve heard about the reduction in our assistant principal position to 50%. We’re very concerned about that but our main concern is that the language used by the board about New Vista is consistently negative. Excerpt 14 (Spokesperson for Latino community, 22 May 1997, Line 517) Our real concern is access, and real access to the schools uh by the Latino communities.
Rhetorical questions A discourse device that appeared regularly in citizens’ speeches was the rhetorical question. Traditionally, rhetorical questions are thought of as a speech device to pique listener interest and promote engagement (Zarefsky, 2005); college
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public speaking textbooks recommend that speakers consider using them in their introductions (Griffin, 2006; O’Hair et al., 2004). In these school board speeches, this was not their most common position or use. Instead rhetorical questions occurred near the end of a speech where they summed up a speaker’s argument focused on confronting or criticizing the board. For example, in a speech giving an evaluation of how the board had functioned during the school year, a teacher had identified a long list of dissatisfactions and then concluded with a final one: Excerpt 15 (12 June 1997, Line 421) Will there be administrators dismissed this summer? Will that occur in July when no one is around?
Excerpt 15 is also an example of the fact that rhetorical questions commonly appeared in pairs. Often the first question served to describe the current situation using some of the feeling-limned practices noted in the prior section (e.g. a negative speech act – be ‘dismissed’) while the second was used to offer the speaker’s negative assessment (e.g. implying that July would be selected to avoid scrutiny). In essence, speakers deliver a one-two punch. Two more examples of this discourse move can be seen in Excerpt 16 (supporting the superintendent’s removal of the coach) and Excerpt 17 (questioning the hiring of the militaryexperienced superintendent). Excerpt 16 (26 June 1997, Line 114) Why would the decision of a highly qualified, very competent superintendent, be changed? Is it politics or is it protecting one’s own friend? Excerpt 17 (26 June 1996, Line 1113) There would be no one there with any knowledge or background in elementary education. How will Commander Seigel educate himself? The district wouldn’t hire lawyers to advise them if they hadn’t passed the bar, we wouldn’t go to a doctor who hadn’t passed their medical boards. Why do you think it’s fine to hire an educational leader who knows so little about education, even if he’s very willing to learn?
These rhetorical questions implicitly make hostile assertions, much like crossexamination questioning in American courts does (Excerpt 16: it was politics and protecting one’s own friend; Excerpt 17: Commander Seigel will be unable to educate himself). The question form gives these hostile remarks two advantages that do not accrue to assertions. First, assertions make relevant whether speakers have evidence for what they are saying; rhetorical questions background this concern. Second, when we refashion a rhetorical question as a statement, it becomes a particularly hostile move. By virtue of the fact that a negative judgment is only implied in a question form, rhetorical questions have a certain degree of ambiguity. At the same time, they allow speakers to make highly critical claims without incurring the negative personal assessment that might be made if accusations, and especially unsubstantiated ones, were straightforwardly offered. Rhetorical questions enabled speakers to protect their own face, while (somewhat) lessening the degree of face-attack on the other.
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Reported speech Another device that was commonly present in citizen speeches was reported speech. Also labeled quoted speech (Holsanova, 2006) and constructed speech (Tannen, 1989), reported speech has many varieties and purposes (for a review, see Buttny, 2004). One important one, well documented in Holt’s (1996) study of conversation, is to lend an air of objectivity to a speaker. Reported speech is packaged as just saying what another said and it is left up to the listener to draw conclusions about what it means. Reported speech can be used to invoke an expert in support of one’s position. It is also a way to express a negative opinion of another while minimizing the likelihood that a speaker will be seen as a ‘bad-mouther’ or unfairly negative to others. Excerpt 18 gives an example of a parent narrating why he is upset about the decision to remove the coach. In addition to reporting the speech of a party, his comment also illustrates what we would call ‘reported action’, describing a scene in an apparently neutral, unbiased style – not feeling-limned description – which, similar to reported speech, conveys objectivity. Excerpt 18 (22 June 1997, line 77) I received a notice of a meeting of Boulder High Basketball parents, past and present, to be held on May 28th, 1997 by the parent basketball committee to discuss coaching. I went to this meeting. I was greeted by Mr Mullen. Ellen Gallaher and Marti Stearns and showed me to a family room where the meeting was to be held. Before the meeting started I was approached by Mr Mullen and Marti Stearns instructing me to go to the front door to discuss something. Mr Mullen said and I quote, we would like you to leave or I will call the police and have you arrested. I was told by Marti Stearns that I didn’t agree with their views on the coaching staff. I, as a concerned parent, was asked to leave or I would be arrested. What kind of parent group is this?
Use of ‘god’ and ‘devil’ terms In The Ethics of Rhetoric, Richard Weaver (1953) describes terms – what he labeled god and devil terms – that are culturally powerful. The mere mention of a god or devil term invokes an unquestionable sense of rightness or wrongness toward whatever actions are paired with the term. God and devil terms, Weaver argues, vary across cultures and historical time periods; they also, we suggest, vary across communicative contexts. In school board meetings the ‘the children’ is a frequently invoked god term used to advance what a speaker favors or to criticize an opposing idea. Schools are certainly about ‘the children’; the difficult decisions that school boards need to make, though, are about which children’s needs or whose view of them should be affirmed. In using children as a god term, speakers side-stepped this complexity, treating children’s needs as if they did not compete with each other and had a fact-like transparency. One of the few parents to speak in support of the district’s decision to remove the high school coach, ended her speech by saying, ‘And we ask that you remember the bottom line for all decisions made by this board are about our children. Thank you.’
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A middle school coach speaking at the same meeting, but against the removal of the high school coach, likewise started and ended his speech with an appeal to the ‘kids’. Excerpt 19 (26 June 1997, Line 289) My name is uh Chuck Snowden, er I’m a teacher at Casey Middle School and I’ve only come here for one reason and that’s because I love kids. The loser in this situation will be kids and the best example I can give of that is this, how can you get another quality coach in such a short time period when there is no full time job for a teacher at Boulder High? [320 additional words] … So I hope this school board will be in balance and consider the kids and not all political stuff. Thank you very much.
Use of ‘the children’ by speakers advanced many different specific arguments, but all anchored in a desired end that should be attended to or an undesirable outcome to be avoided. Consider how a parent argued that funding be approved for an alternative high school (i.e. Baobob). Excerpt 20 (22 May 1997, Line 185) … Me and our students have found that home in Baobab. They not only recognize the fact that our children are different, they celebrate it. For many of us Baobab is our hope. If you win your bid to revoke our charter, the bottom line is our children lose. And quite frankly I thought they were the reason we were all here, which has the complete support of our review at the University of Colorado, for over two years to finally open. These students need Baobab now, not next year. Thank you.
Sometimes ‘children’ was invoked as a god term where it was not entirely clear what particular action was good or bad. Nonetheless a strong evaluation of the responsible actors was conveyed. A citizen who spoke following others who had commented about the coach, raised a question about whether high school kids would be allowed to take selected college courses. Following a short exchange with the superintendent, that affirmed that the district would be continuing this practice, he concluded his moments at the microphone saying: Excerpt 21 (26 June 1997, Line 456) Okay then I just have one other thing to say and I won’t add anymore to it. I just wanted to say this. And this is kind of my summation of- of the of the school thing. I heard about the coach and everything else. And I just, I just would like to ask you guys this question tonight. And that is, will the children you were yesterday, would they be proud of the decision you’re gonna make tonight? Thank you.
In addition to illustrating another instance of a rhetorical question to criticize, we see ‘children’ being invoked to call up a pure untainted vantage point from which assessment can be made. Appeals to ‘the children’ occurred regularly across topics and meetings. Less frequent and more topically restricted, were words that seemed to function as devil terms. The most obvious term that functioned as a devil term was ‘political’. Speakers used ‘politics’ and ‘political’ to damn actions. Examples of this are seen in the union speaker who describes his and other teachers’ anger at the way
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tests were being interpreted (Excerpt 10) and in Excerpt 19. Below are two other examples: Excerpt 22 (26 June 1997, Line 333) As a father of three boys, one who is currently in the program and two soon to be and who will be involved with in this program for the next 8 years, I strongly recommend that the board reconsider this termination without cause by ah, by a lame-duck principal and superintendent that looks to be politically motivated. Excerpt 23 (26 June 1997, Line 379) I talked to one of the fathers afterwards, a couple of days later. I ran into him at my daughter’s baseball game and I said, ‘You know, did you sign the petition?’ And he said, ‘No.’ And I said, ‘Well why didn’t you sign it?’ And he said, ‘Because I go- walked away from that meeting saying it is all a political thing. It was definitely between Jean Bonelli [the principal] and the school board.’ And I feel like that’s what it was. And I ask you to reinstate Phil Huff, please.
Framing an action as ‘politically motivated’ is to indict an action as unfair and personally motivated. Its understood contrast is with decisions that are ‘objective’, and informed by ‘facts’ and ‘evidence’. This pejorative meaning of political is one that is commonplace in many settings. In workplaces, people regularly describe decisions with which they disagree as ‘political’. But, to use ‘political’ as a devil term in school governance situations seems at least a little strange. It does, however, point to the continued power of a consensual, non-adversarial ideal of decision-making. Meeting rules as weapons The president’s announcement at the start of meetings about the expected rules for citizen conduct – be civil and respectful and don’t attack – can be seen as an attempt to insure that the district’s public meetings had a reasonable feeling tone. When the president (Hult) was asked in an interview why the board read the statement at each meeting’s start, she mentioned that a superintendent of a large district had suggested it. The rule’s purpose, she noted, was to be a ‘little preface going into their Board meetings to try to calm people down. Because people are so agitated about issues. And uh try and calm them down. Try to keep the conversation on a little bit nicer level, a better level.’5 As Hult recognized, however, the civility rule did not have its intended effect. First and foremost, a conduct rule has to be enforced. Quite often, as Potter and Hepburn (in press) show, doing so is interactionally delicate. In the three cases out of the 101 speakers where the chair declared a rule violation (one is illustrated in Excerpt 11) the speaker disagreed and resisted the characterization. But not only was enforcing a conduct rule a sensitive matter, the rule itself could be metaphorically grabbed by a citizen and used as a weapon directed against one or another member of the board. This rule reference could be done to deliver a small slap, as is seen in Excerpt 24 when a speaker comments on the president’s actions.
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Using the rule against board members was also used to deliver heavier, more critical punches as can be seen in the next two excerpts. In Excerpt 25 a parent has criticized the board for their interpretation of the reading test scores. In moving to her closing she states, Excerpt 25 (22 May 1997, Line 610) I am hoping that the school board will not resort to this muckraking type of journalism to advance an agenda at the expense of our schools and students. Each of these twenty [children below the 50th percentile on the 4th grade reading test] represents a child, a child struggling to learn our language yet alone to read at an average level. Did you realize that Russian, Korean, Chinese, Hmong, and Spanish are the first languages of these eight ESL students? I ask you with all civility and all respect could any of you go to another country, go to Russia and write a dissertation in that language in two years? ((pause)) Please be careful how you use the data and how you hurt people with the comments that are made.
In describing herself as asking ‘with all civility and all respect’ she echoes the president’s statement of the conduct rule and applies the descriptor to herself. Unlike a disclaimer (e.g. ‘don’t take this as disrespectful and uncivil but …’) which would implicitly acknowledge that her comment could be heard as disrespectful, her self-labeling treats her intention as transparently good. It delivers an additional sting by recruiting the president’s words to use against her (Antaki and Leudar, 2001). A final example of using the conduct rule as a weapon is seen in the remarks of a citizen who is defending the board majority and criticizing the members in the minority who have been vocal in criticizing the board majority for their incivility. The speaker’s criticism in Excerpt 26 is both an appeal to the rule, as well as another instance of using a person’s words against them. Excerpt 26 (26 May 1997, Line 35) Question to the members of the coalition [implicates the two board members in the minority] is what happened to honesty, integrity, honor and due process? Is this your representation of civility? These actions of which I speak tonight are the ultimate in tampering, interference and coercion of candidates. I thank you.
Implications of the BVSD case for citizenship and democracy By looking at citizens as they seek to shape the ‘minor affair’ of their public schools, what have we learned? What conclusions about democracy and citizenship are suggested by this study of participation? First, participation not only conveyed what individuals thought and wanted, but it contributed in an important way to building a collective BVSD community
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identity. Citizens’ arguments about what should (should not) be happening in BVSD were rarely made only in terms of the speakers’ interest. Instead, speakers framed what they advocated in arguments about a larger public good that extended beyond themselves to other segments of the community or the district as a whole. Admittedly, arguments that a particular school program, a certain level of library services, or retention of a coach were needed in the district often had a speaker-serving function. Yet, what may be less obvious is how arguing for self-advantaging decisions using ‘a community good’ idiom, is an important discursive practice for constructing and giving life to community-specific, grouplevel ideals. Talk about at-risk kids’ needs or the Boulder Valley community’s need is exactly how supra-individual concerns became real and legitimate touchstones for decision-making. In a study of several civic groups in the USA, including an activist environmental group – but not school board meetings – Eliasoph (1998) developed the argument that US public discourse is affected by a shrinking circle of concern. In public meetings citizens spoke for their personal interests and rarely argued in terms of a larger community good (e.g, don’t site this waste plant here because it will hurt my kids). We did not see this in the BVSD meetings. Speakers articulated what was needed for their families, but they did so by framing their wants in terms of a larger public good. Why citizens adopted public-and communitygood arguments to discuss schools and education, but not environmental issues, is an interesting question. At the least, it suggests the importance of not assuming that how citizens express themselves in one context is identical to how they do so in another. Second, this case underscores the evaluative complexity of different levels of citizen participation. Low levels of participation may evince problems of citizen alienation and apathy (Eliasoph, 1998; Putnam, 2000), but at the same time a low level could be the result of a high degree of citizen satisfaction. Zeigler et al. (1974) made this point more than 30 years ago in a study of local school districts. The ‘dissatisfaction theory of democracy’ (Lutz and Iannaccone, 1987; see also Alsbury, 2004), in fact, argues that participation in school districts needs to be thought about in a multi-year time frame that recognizes the reasonableness of different levels of participation across time. Citizens, the dissatisfaction theory argues, will turn out when they have concerns. Much of the rest of the time, they leave governing decisions to the educational professionals. As US public schools are governed by competing ideals – education decisions should be made on the basis of expertise (i.e. little citizens’ participation is needed), and decisions should reflect the will of the people (i.e. a good level of citizen participation is crucial) – ebbs and flows in participation not only happen, but should be seen as reasonable. What the desirable level of participation actually should be is quite a bit messier than a single abstract ideal. Competing principles, Barber comments, ‘often coexist productively in a tension that is the essence of a viable democracy’ (p. xv). Just as low levels of participation may not always be bad, high levels of participation are not categorically ‘good’. To underscore an obvious fact, high levels
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of citizen participation occur when there is widespread unhappiness about a community’s schools or its governance practices. Large numbers of citizens speak out in meetings because they are upset and mad. The right of citizens to publicly criticize governing officials, including local school board members, is an essential feature of democracy. Citizens bringing grievances and speaking critically about leaders is one important facet of what it means for a group to be a democratic body. When citizens exercise their rights to express outrage, however, the expression will cut and bruise some community members. At times certain levels or kinds of citizen outrage can wound others so much that a group’s ability to keep talking about matters that matter is seriously damaged. Most of the BVSD citizens engaged in what we would label ‘reasonable hostility’. Their expressions of disagreement, criticism, and outrage energized the community’s discussion and did so without tearing the relational fabric that is needed to sustain democracy. As one speaker remarked, ‘I haven’t been to a school board meeting in, I think it’s been about 8 years. Um and I just wanted to make an observation that it sure is a lot more fun now than it was 10 years ago (laughs).’ ‘At its best’, argues Allen (2004: xiii), ‘democracy is full of contention and fluid disagreement but free of settled patterns of mutual disdain’. To achieve this without-disdain contention – or, perhaps more realistically, a no-more-thanmoderately disdainful contention – strangers must have some level of trust in the others with whom they speak. Although not the only tool, how people talk to and about each other is a central one for creating trust. This case study suggests that the key normative issue for discourse scholars studying citizenship talk is to conceptualize ‘reasonable hostility’. How should feeling expression be tied to rational argument making? That a useful model of citizenship discourse must yoke emotion to argumentative reasoning is not a new idea. In the early 1900s, pragmatist philosopher John Dewey argued that emotion was integral to democracy; since then, many others have argued similarly (Keith, 2006). What has been left under-analyzed is how emotion and argument should be tethered. As we saw in the BVSD case, personal involvement was the motor that got citizens caring about an issue (i.e. emotional), willing to get off their couches, attend meetings, and speak. When citizens spoke, their talk conformed to a genre and they expressed negative emotion using feeling-limned description, avowal of feelings, rhetorical questions, reported speech, and god and devil terms. These practices for weaving feelings into substantive arguments presumably influenced the board’s immediate decision-making direction and, more certainly, affected the larger-frame decision about who should be making future decisions. When hostile expression leads groups of people to quit talking, expression has become unreasonably hostility. Conceptualizing reasonable hostility – rather than pronouncing hostile feelings as out of bounds entirely – is the job that future communication research needs to address. If democracy is found in the ebb and flow of citizen participation at public meetings, then describing the discourse of reasonable hostility is as crucial to democratic life as is characterizing what counts as civility.
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Thanks to Rebecca Townsend, Bob Craig, Theresa Castor, and Steve Konieczka for helpful comments on this article.
N OT E S
1. This characterization is based on the minutes posted on the BVSD website (http:// www.bvsd.org/C3/Board/default.aspx) for meetings from August 2005 through the end of May 2006. 2. Nine citizen speeches toward the end of the 12 June 1997 were not videotaped. The participation analysis is based on the 101 speeches that were taped and then transcribed. 3. Determining speaker sex from the minutes was usually easy, as most speakers had clear gender-marked names (Susan versus Bill). In addition, minutes frequently included third-person pronouns that further cued speaker sex (e.g. ‘Mary Smith said that she was concerned about the budget proposal to …’). In the few cases where the cues were ambiguous, we assigned the speaker to the sex we thought most likely. Of note, although the minutes were generally quite good, there were inaccuracies: occasional speakers were omitted, or people were included who had signed up but had left before they had a chance to speak. 4. Italics indicate segments that are the focus of commentary. 5. Personal interview with Stephanie Hult.
REFERENCES
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is a Professor of Communication at the University of Colorado at Boulder. She regularly publishes in communication and discourse journals, is past editor of the journal, Research on Language and Social Interaction, and is author of Everyday Talk: Building and Reflecting Identities (2002) and Colloquium: Dilemmas of Academic Discourse (1997). She is currently at work on a book, Ordinary Democracy: Troubles and Triumphs in School Board Meetings. A D D R E S S : Communication Department, UCB 270, University of Colorado, Boulder, CO 80309, USA. [email:
[email protected]] KAREN TRACY
is a Master’s student at the University of Colorado. She received her Bachelor’s degree from Michigan State University. She is interested in using Discourse Analysis to study gendered communication, democratic processes, and equitable procedures in organizations. [email:
[email protected]]
MARGARET DURFY
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