Communicative Silence

I have encountered a lot of different, strange, harmful, and interesting things centred around communication this week and it has had me thinking about how much communication is used in pedagogical spaces. Or thinking about it another way, what happens when communication breaks down.

I've been thinking a lot about the whole who communicates first thing this week. You know like you see on social media so many posts about, hey if you didn't text your friends would they text you first. You know those posts - those are clearly the kind of posts that our students interact with on a regular basis too. Because as much as posts like that are sad, in that they reinforce the heavy lifting that happens in the work of relationship supporting and maintenance, it also draws attention to the fact that often that work within community or relationships is not equal. There is someone who will be the person to reach out first and that if you stop texting and trying to maintain that relationship chances are they will not reach out to do that work. And what does that say about our relationships? And in turn what does that say about when that happens in our eduspaces.

Often I will hear faculty say, I wish the student would have talked to me about what was going on. And yes of course we would love students to reach out when something is happening. But for that to happen there needs to be some sort of trust built that engages with the fact that in a teaching team member-student relationship there is innately power imbalances which mean that students may feel uncomfortable reaching out in the first place.

So we can say to students please reach out, and we can and should do the lifting of maintaining those communication channels, remind them of assignments, say things numerous times using different channels in class but also on the LMS and maybe via email. More is always better than less. Because communicative silence pedagogically can do harm and break trust. This is why having a 24-hour rule on email responses (or some other way to acknowledge communication) is a good thing to have. And sometimes students will reach out (like one did this week) and thank you for your communication and clarity. 

Therefore yes, there will always be someone who is putting in more work in terms of communicating. In pedagogical spaces it is often the teaching team members. In friendship spaces there is always the one who reaches out to check in and sometimes they will respond to that check in. Or what happened to me in a channel this week which is I checked in on a group of folk because I knew there were hard things happening, and got crickets.

And that communicative silence does a different kind of work. It says okay maybe the group doesn't actually want to engage with the hard (which I think is the case because a follow up message days later minimized what I had reached out about) or it says well maybe they don't want to engage with the hard with you. Which again is something to sit with, because maybe they appreciate the check in, but not the person who did the checking. 

Similarly I was in a meeting this week where someone identified systemic racism and gaps happening. I reached out to that person after and thanked them for that work, acknowledged it was work, and framed how there may be things we need to review in that group. I tried to communicate with the person because I felt communicative silence would be the opposite thing to do here; silence in this situation could be read as ignoring the very real situation being put forward. Instead because I choose to not be the one to silence, I was in turn the one given the weight of not addressing the racism in the first place. And don't get me wrong, absolutely there were things I should have said in that situation that I didn't before we got there, but it was interesting to me that as a relatively new member to the group, that the others who were silent about the realness brought forward were not given the same weight of responsibility. Sometimes not being silent means you are the person who has to carry that weight and do the work to repair spaces. 

So it has had me thinking over the last few days of the work that silence does. That sometimes folk go towards silence because it is way of getting away from acknowledging or doing the work of community building or even individual support. And there could be reasons for that for sure, maybe they are already at capacity, they can't carry one more thing. Or maybe it is because they really are not interested in maintaining that relationship anymore for whatever reason. 

I mention this because silence doesn't always have one reason in eduspace either. Students go silent not because they are trying to actively make things difficult, it is usually because they don't know how to first bridge the silence and power dynamics. They can go silent because they don't know the question to ask, or even the next step. So just like statements like "I am here for you" that don't follow up with something tangible that can show you being there (like making soup, or talking to someone for that person cause they don't have capacity, or running an errand) are kind of empty words, the communicative silence gap can be bridged with an action towards next steps. Things like an email outlining what should be a priority. Or even a message saying, I am acknowledging that you have been quiet for a while (or I haven't seen or heard from you in a while), you don't have to respond, I just want you to know that your lack of presence is felt. 

It is incredibly hard to human right now. I think the reason for that is that people are having different ways to communicate that are not resonating and some of that is generational and some of that is situational. But what is important to acknowledge is that the silence does its own work, and sometimes it is intentional, and sometimes it is not, and sometimes it is just a feature of the systemic.

It is a long weekend here, and I know I will be spending even more time thinking about those silences and the work that they do, and how those who choose to not be silent are often the ones tasked with more work and holding of space. And maybe a nice thing you could do, if you have capacity, is reach out to someone you haven't heard from in a while to see how they are...you know just to disrupt that communicative silence and question why it was there in the first place. And also also, maybe thank the person who is always holding the spaces for the hard in your area, because you know there is always that person and I bet you they are very tired.