An Introduction, 

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As teachers in the Rhetoric Department, we know the range of academic engagement possible within each of our classrooms.  So much of my time as an instructor in RHET:1030 involved building a type of intellectual communion between the students who were willing to engage the content of the class, the students who were unwilling to engage the content of the class, and everyone in between.  There are those special days – as I’m sure you all cherish as much as I do – where everyone in the learning community is firing at 100%.  These days are oftentimes framed in terms of productivity: a vivid classroom discussion on a challenging text, a focused overview of the peer review sessions that will start tomorrow, a lively debate about a current event.  But as we all were required to adjust our teaching over this past year, I began to think about how to encourage personal agency within each individual student’s learning experience. 

 

 

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Shared in the way that each individual’s level of commitment impacts the whole, private in that we extend our personal agency to define for ourselves what that level of commitment will be.  Silence allows for us in educational spaces to move this intrinsic tension to the foreground of our experience: we collectively share silence, but individually choose to manifest it.  And, if conjured in the right way, we put ourselves in service of learning.
 

This final aspect is one that I have found particularly exciting, as we all continue to think about how to democratize the classroom experience and reorganize power structures.  As someone who has spent time thinking about silence as a generative space in both Quaker meetings and the theater, I have found the uniformity of experience within those that participate in silent practice to be an especially powerful tool in orienting an idea, a problem, a question (as opposed to an individual) at the center of community engagement. 

 

But as one of the rhetoric department’s wonderful faculty members reminded me when we spoke together on this subject: “People choose to participate in a Quaker meeting.  There isn’t always the same willingness on the part of our first-year rhetoric students…”  So, it became clear that another objective within this project would be to integrate the concept of silence as something to study through the lens of rhetoric.  How does silence behave as a persuasive tool?  What are the rhetorical implications of silence, silencing, and being silenced?  

 

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I have used Rhetoric as a model for my work, but I think these ideas extend beyond this academic discipline and I hope that other teachers –regardless of where they teach – might be encouraged to integrate some of these concepts into their classrooms.

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Thank you.  Please peruse the resources on this site and use this material freely as you begin to consider how to better integrate silence into your classroom community.  I hope that these tools will be useful for you--