About silence : a matter for educational settings

”… if we know more about silence, we will know more about ourselves”, states Jaworski. What then do we know about silence? Sometimes people are silent of their own free will, while others have silence thrust upon them. Others are perhaps silent to demonstrate their position of strength or superiority with regard to others. To have understanding of and insight into the meaning and different aspects of silence is of importance to life itself, as well as to different educational settings. Within the framework of this paper, the significance of silence for educational settings will be highlighted and discussed. The discussion will be based on the recently published book ”Om tystnad - i pedagogiska sammanhang” [About Silence - in educational settings] (Alerby, 2012).The presentation will deal with issues like - is it accepted for students to be silent? Or is this seen as a problem? Some students are experienced by others or by themselves as silent. Perhaps they are neither given, nor do they take, the silent space that is required for participation in the conversation. They remain silent even though the ongoing discussion wakens thoughts and opinions, and they continue to be silent even though they know the answer to the question which the teacher has just asked. Most silent students probably have an opinion to add to the discussion or an answer to give to the question, but they choose for some reason not to express this, and therefore remain silent in the eyes (or ears) of others. But are they really silent? One way to approach these issues is to take the phenomenological movement as a point of departure. To be more precise - this paper will discuss silence in educational settings using a phenomenological life-world approach.Godkänd; 2012; 20120327 (ysko