I am delighted to share another beautiful submission to our Monk in the World guest post series from the community. Read on for Amy Oden’s reflection on silence in academic settings.
As a professor I live much of my life with students in learning and discovery. This happens in physical classrooms, outside classrooms, in retreat settings and in virtual spaces. I’m noticing how my contemplative journey continues to shape and transform my teaching. My monk-in-the-world speaks into course design and class sessions, drawing my attention to the rhythms we inhabit together as learners. Life with students has been a wonderful place to experiment with the ways rhythms cultivate our common life and discovery.
For the past few years, I’ve played with rhythms by introducing silence into learning spaces where traditionally it has been assumed that “learning equals talking.” By simply challenging this assumption, that learning happens only when we are talking, silence has been transformative both for me and for my students.
I notice changes in me as I have introduced silence into the classroom. First, I’ve learned that I can take risks. Holding silence in an academic environment has felt very risky. The assumption that learning only happens with words is widespread and longstanding. To not fill the space with words risks irresponsible pedagogy and downright shirking of one’s duty. What I know in my inner being, however, is that students deserve to be exposed to this ancient wisdom, that when we listen with silence we learn surprising things.
Perhaps more profoundly for me personally has been that as I sit with silence in the classroom, I release my own expectations about learning and even – radical for me — relax my attachment to course “content,” all the material I think I’m supposed to cover. Silence itself becomes course content.
As I release expectations about covering content, I become more relaxed and more present to students as well as myself. I’m more able to attune to my own presence and thereby also to student learning, to student questions and curiosities. These are all connected.
Taking risks with silence in academic settings has been possible for me because of my own contemplative journey into silence. Over the years, silence has become a centerpiece of my daily life rhythm, welcoming me into deeper listening, deeper holding what is and into deeper love. I’ve discovered how rich and fertile silence is. I’ve found that silence as something as well as nothing, presence as well as absence, full as well as empty.
Silence has been transformative for students, too. At first, silence is a bit jarring, as students enter it unsure how to be with it. It’s been pretty amazing to see students relax and learn to rest in the silence. As they sink into silence, they slow down, attending more closely to the discoveries unfolding within them. Their learning seems to root more deeply and concretely in real places in their lives.
Soon enough, as we integrate silence into our rhythms, students become more curious about their inner listening, less likely to jump to quick conclusions and more able to linger and wonder, as learning becomes more exploration than consumption, more interactive than passive.
In addition, students become more curious about their peers and their peers’ learning. As students get more comfortable in silence, they are more able to sit with their peers’ wonderings. They are not as quick to give advice, try to fix or gloss over one another’s realities. Classroom engagement deepens with greater capacity to hold tensions, explore unknowns and allow others their own pace of discovery.
Students report that this practice of silence within an academic environment is life-changing for them. I often hear, “Why haven’t we been taught this before?” Their academic formation has focused primarily on the cognitive and on speech. Expanding learning beyond these categories through silence opens students up to greater possibilities they are excited to pursue.
I also hear, “This completely changes how I experience learning in my other classes and in my wider life” and “I’m no longer just trying to figure out what the professor wants and instead owning learning for myself.”
I’m grateful to have these spaces to live into the wisdom of contemplative practices. I’m learning, along with students, to “Above all, trust in the slow work of God” (Teilhard de Chardin). May it be so.
Born and raised on the prairies of Oklahoma, Amy has found her spiritual home under the wide-open sky. Her passion is to introduce spiritual practices that can ground and nourish lives to follow Jesus into the world. She has been a seminary professor for 35 years, walking alongside students. For the last 10 years, she has focused on spiritual formation and direction.
