Disrupting deficit: The power of 'the pause' in resisting the dominance of deficit knowledges in education

Deficit ways of speaking about educationally displaced young people are a dominant feature in the language educators draw on to make sense of particular young people. This language can have debilitating effects on the lives of those young people it is applied to. Despite well over 20 years of critique, deficit truths have remained dominant. However, in one Australian organisation, this dominance is being resisted. The resistance makes its appearance through an active silence I have termed the pause. The notion of the pause came from teacher interviews in an ethnographic study of four alternative schools in one Australian organisation working with young people experiencing the extremes of disadvantage. I use the Foucaultian notion of silence to explore the suggestion that the pause is one tactic deployed by this organisation, working to both resist and disrupt the dominance of deficit knowledges. I argue that these educators deployment of the pause demonstrates their formation of a space where new language about these young people is engaged.