The Work of Learning from Silence

We draw on two studies of silence as a social achievement: one from a Quaker Meeting in which adult congregants use five kinds of silence to orchestrate their situation (Steinbock, 2012); the other from a second grade classroom in which children and their teacher employ 16 kinds of silence to juggle a question–answer exchange on arithmetic (Rutherford-Quach, 2013). Silence is not ‘an empty space,’ said Charles Goodwin (2018, p. 201), ‘but a place occupied by its own relevant activity.’ We stress the productive nuances of silence, illustrating its use as a flexible resource in the relations among people in specific learning situations. At Quaker Meeting, silence as ‘relevant activity’ is both goal and method for arranging a space for reflection and spiritual reorientation. In a second grade classroom, silence gains its relevance in the rougher interactional waters of schools where aspects of ability, attention, and intelligence are negotiated and turned into institutional identities.