Silence, focal practices, and educative experience

Conventionally, schools are known as places where quiet indicates a fearful withholding in the face of the teacher’s punishment. Within a phenomenological framework, such a quiet differs radically from genuine silence. It does little to help us think about the way in which the arts and silence interact to create educative experience. In this manuscript, we will use Heidegger’s reflections on silence as a grounding for our inquiry. Heidegger’s diagnosis of the human condition centers on our common, everyday dealings with the world. A concomitant of this view of humanity is the way “common sense” comes to overdetermine our relationships, leading us into conformity and inauthentic ways of talking and relating. By way of contrast, educative experience is only available as we re-orient ourselves to the concrete possibilities of the lifeworld and the opportunities it provides for satisfying and self-disclosing work. Having established this phenomenological framework, in the second half of the manuscript we turn to two distinct practices—photography and yoga—to further explore the contours of educative experience and its relationship to silence.