Ways of Performing and Regarding Practices of Silence in Classrooms: Reflections with Wittgenstein and Foucault

Taking an approach Michael Peters referred to as ‘Writing the Self’ (2000), I deconstruct and reconstruct an investigation into reading silence in the classroom that I presented in Kyoto in 2008. The case I was focusing on then was how a non-Asian teacher like myself could read various performances of silence by his Asian students, who were mostly second and sometimes first-generation immigrants in Canada. Writing during the launch of a character education initiative in Ontario (2008), my concern was that in promoting the Western virtue of ‘courage’ (e.g., to speak in public), educators were simultaneously engaging in a process of effectively closing off space for performances of humility—often considered a virtue among Asian peoples. Harboring similar concerns twelve years later, now with assessing participation of my Teacher Candidates during discussions or seminars at the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education, I come at this question from another angle, using the same philosophical lens of Wittgenstein and Foucault’s genealogical approaches but this time with more self-scrutiny or examination of my own social-linguistic location. I return to Jose Medina’s work (2006) to pick up a line I wish I had pursued further in 2008, of more actively bridging the hermeneutical divide I was essaying and then cultivating practices that constructively respond to silence.