When is silence a useful teaching tool and how could it be applied?
During the microteach session, one of my peers Peju used silence to teach knitting to the group. I was amazed at the effect of this method on the group. Peju was showing the group how to knit and we were meant to follow her movements. Her silence was asking us to remove the noise, the terminology, the intimidation and just focus on the action of knitting. equally it promoted peer to peer support, as there was no verbal guidance from the ‘teacher’.
After my observation with Tim, Tim mentioned the use of a ‘show and tell’ of work in which every participant would get the same amount of time to show their work. He also spoke about the fact that not everyone will talk for their time slot but that time should still be theirs and it might mean everyone gets to observe their work for that time: taking the time to honour, consider celebrate, but also learning to sit together in silence.
**how can silence be empowering for those that are less confident with speech / for those that are anxious?
**what can silence do for students whose english is not their first language?
**What can silence do for focus? Observation?
Similarly, it is the silence of the tutor that encourages peer-to-peer feedback to occur and a lack of instruction that allows self-initiation. Is silence a mechanism that can balance social dynamics? When is silence translated into nothing-ness, and when is it facilitating knowledge? The allocation of prompts, materials, time and space, can support its generative intention: its a tool that can be applied in conjunction with a framework.
In the past I have also run silent crits, in which students sharing their work are not allowed to ‘defend’ their images. Instead, they sit in silence while the rest of the group decodes / deconstructs / engages / analyses the work and asks questions. At the end of this process, they have a conversation with the rest of the group about what happened. This process ‘tests’ the readability of images and enriches the observational analytical ability of the readers. Equally, it involves a certain level of trust in the work and participants (can they read my work? Will they take the time to understand what I have made?)
Lastly, it makes me think of silent role plays, or meditations.