This project began for me in considering the work of American-Canadian painter Agnes Martin, who uses the grid and color as a subject for her work.  Martin’s paintings harbor an aesthetic sensibility that moves beyond the initial impression that it is in some way engaged with the spiritual; her work regards silent practice as the paintings conjure her hand, holding a brush, marked with color moving without sound across canvas.  Martin imbues her work with meaning by treating painting as a form of recorded performance, which reiterates continuously in our contemporary and future engagement with it. 

 

As I investigated this aesthetic question, I began to consider how silence in the classroom has the capacity to function in the same way as Martin’s paintings.  Silence not only holds space for specific meaning, but also syncopates that meaning throughout every instance of its implication.  Silence is a practice that holds within it the memory of its previous iterations, and so, when practiced as a collective, it has the capacity to bridge experience by way of articulating communal bonds.  This will be important work for us to regard intentionally as instructors as we exit the COVID-19 pandemic and continue to conceive of new ways to build an equitable ethos in our classrooms.  We are all tasked with considering how we might be changed by what we have experienced together this past year.  Silence can and should be one option. 

 

I hope that this work that is gathered here will act as an invitation for other instructors to simply consider their relationship with silence.  By no means is the pedagogical study that lives here complete, nor will it be consistently deployed from classroom to classroom.  I gave a presentation a few weeks ago, offering the first lesson in the sequence I created.  I ended the presentation by saying this, which continues to feel true: “In order to encourage ourselves and our students to encounter silence as an enriching mode of performance, a space that is in fact ripe with intellectual possibility, we must move our collective attention to silence in an intentional way.  Perhaps the simple lesson that I have presented today isn’t the right way to do that in your classroom.  But I hope that you feel moved to speak with your students about silence in whatever way you see fit.  No matter how excellent we become at teaching, silence will always be an aspect of our practice.  I hope that these few minutes we spent together will encourage you to notice and embrace its presence.”

 

Thank you.