Facilitating critical conversations includes helping students unpack dominant ideologies, interrupting stereotypes, creating a context for marginalized voices, and strategizing ways for taking action. Oftentimes, that means that teachers must recognize what silences are occurring, interpret why those silences are happening, and figure out the best moves to make to either interrupt or protect that silence. As facilitators of critical conversations with teachers, we explored the silences that occurred in a teacher inquiry group focused on improving the facilitation of such dialogue in high school English classrooms. Critical discourse analysis and reflexive analysis were used to examine transcripts from those inquiry discussions. Findings suggest that privileged and veiled silences circulated, and indirect silences disrupted, race-evasive discourses with a diverse group of teachers. Implications discuss how teachers and teacher educators can engage in reflexivity, specifically in relation to how they may inadvertently support white-centered discourse, to improve their facilitation of critical conversations by using an expanded notion of silence as a tool for critical discourse analysis.

促进批判性对话包括帮助学生解开主导意识形态、打断刻板印象、为边缘化声音创造环境，以及制定采取行动的策略。通常，这意味着教师必须识别正在发生的沉默，解释这些沉默发生的原因，并找出中断或保护沉默的最佳措施。作为与教师进行批判性对话的促进者，我们探讨了教师探究小组中发生的沉默，该小组专注于改善高中英语课堂中此类对话的促进作用。使用批判性话语分析和反思性分析来检查这些探究讨论的成绩单。调查结果表明，特权和隐蔽的沉默在流传，间接的沉默被破坏，与不同的教师群体进行回避种族的讨论。含义讨论了教师和教师教育者如何参与反思，特别是关于他们如何无意中支持以白人为中心的话语，以通过使用扩展的沉默概念作为批判性话语分析的工具来促进批判性对话。