Ma and the Epistemological Role of Silence in Classrooms
How do moments of great potential surface in our classrooms?
Some time ago, I walked into the conference room in our school to organize the tablet PCs, and found a teacher and a student sitting in the quiet room, facing each other in silence. Though the room was large, the tension sat above everything like a stuffy blanket. I looked toward the teacher who nodded in my direction; a nonverbal acknowledgement that it was alright to enter.
The student was a girl who had gotten involved in some trouble for speaking negatively about classmates. Obliquely referred to as waruguchi or “bad mouthing”, she’d ended up in some interpersonal strife with her classmates. This was the talk. What proceeded was one of the most interesting experiences in regard to what “getting the talk” looks like in different cultures.
The student’s sniffles echo around the quiet conference room. The teacher asks a question in a somber voice. She nods.
Silence.
She responds in a soft voice.
Teacher hmms.
Silence.
Teacher says a word or two.
Silence.
More sniffles.
Teacher asks something. Sniffles.
Silence.
Student responds again quietly.
Teacher nods. They both stand up, wrap up and exit the room.
Meanwhile, I’d been hanging around the PCs, not really doing anything other than observing the whole interaction. It left me with a sense of having watched something deeply profound unfold. I doubt either the teacher or the student might think of what occurred in that meeting as “profound”, but from my perspective it created a cognitive shift in how I viewed silence as a tool for learning.
Ma and all that exists within nothingness,
Ma is what most of us call “negative space”. The non-area that gives an area its shape. Ma in eastern cultures however, has been imbued with deep philosophical, socio-cultural and epistemic implications. Ma is not something that occurs purely in visual form, but also encapsulates the perception of a void without the need for physical structures. Ma is a chalice for all that might be contained within it.
As such, when a teacher speaks, a student is expected to become this cup. Incidentally, it was my Mother who gave me this analogy at the age of eight or nine when I asked her about what a period was after I’d learned that one of my friends had started menstruating. She effectively told me that she could only pour as much knowledge as my cup could hold lest it all spill over. I understood this as “I’m too young to be told about it right now” and that I must be prepared in heart and body before I am to be enlightened.
In hindsight, I recognize this as both a graceful deflection and a profound teaching moment—a way of honoring my readiness without overwhelming me. Particularly as my Mother acknowledged me as one of those children who wasn’t satisfied with just one answer.
Silence in itself has a host of reasons and results that are difficult to pinpoint or quantify. As such, like the Japanese and their mastery over Ma, perhaps we might consider ways in which, instead of being swept away in the awkwardness of silence, we might harness it for more profound learning.
Silence as a craft,
It’s common knowledge to anyone teaching EFL in Japanese classrooms, that reticent students would rather grind their teeth in pin-drop silence than react to a teacher’s questions. The shifting attitudes of a global classroom have increased the pressure on students to be more proactive in language learning classrooms but that does not actually translate to in-class practice. For any foreign teacher, this is an unnerving space.
King and Aono (2017) recontextualized what silence might mean in these classrooms, arguing that learner tolerance of silence is not fixed, but shifts with context. In Japanese professional settings, for instance, silences in conversation run nearly twice as long as their Western equivalents. This is not discomfort, it is sasshi: the practice of empathetic anticipatory guesswork, where the “junior” reads between the lines of what is implied, and the “senior” holds space for that understanding to arrive.
In this framing, silence works as a vehicle. Not always efficient or effective, but nonetheless, employed to create a specific kind of dynamic. Purposeful and pre-meditated silence moves a learner from awkward anxiety, to a space of introspection and internal clarity. It exists as a space of potential and growth, not a stifling blanket of expectations and unspoken grievances. A masterful use of silence is a craft that requires practice, patience and empathy.
Silence as a cocoon,
There is a tendency to speak of AI as the answer waiting at the end of a question. Vast, luminous, just beyond reach. But the quiet moment between surfacing your needs and composing your prompt is its own kind of ma. The moment of great potential.
In a classroom, the silent rows of blank faces might also be a moment of great potential. As educators, it’s a special kind of despair when we receive no feedback from our students. But perhaps, we might consider alternative ways of utilizing this silence. Sustained Silent Reading, exit tickets, questionnaires, digital game-based learning or other tools at our disposal that allow quiet and reticent students to shine in other ways. To build confidence even if they are not charismatic stars.
By seeing silence in our classrooms as ma, we can shift learning norms. We can confront the fact that perhaps the deepest learning, whether in a quiet conference room or in the pause before a prompt, happens not when we fill silence, but when we learn to inhabit it.
Reference:
King, J., & Aono, A. (2017). Talk, silence and anxiety during one-to-one tutorials: A cross-cultural comparative study of Japan and UK undergraduates’ tolerance of silence. Asia Pacific Education Review, 18(4), 489–499. https://doi.org/10.1007/s12564-017-9503-8