The productivity of stillness

We live in an era in which ‘active learning’ has become accepted as a fundamental goal of good teaching. From early childcare ¹ to university education, ² ‘activity’ has been elevated to a pedagogic principle often without much critical reflection. Over several decades a critique of traditional or more formal approaches to education has produced an increasing emphasis on learning that is said to be more engaged, often under labels such as ‘discovery’ or ‘experiential’ learning, enquiry methods or ‘learning by doing’. Considered more democratic and ‘relevant’ to young people, this progressive desire to give students a greater role in the educational process is admirable. ³ Yet in foregrounding student ‘ownership’ of curriculum, group-based activities and the ‘doing’ of things, it is positioned against a straw man of ‘passive learning’, characterized by the dominance of teacher direction, rote learning and individuated desk work. In this view, a passive learner is one who is seen as quiet, sits still and is seemingly not critically engaged whereas the active learner, who participates in discussion with other students and perhaps moves around the classroom to access resource material, is displaying involvement in the learning process. Stillness, therefore, is viewed as a problem, a ‘disease’ of ‘chalk and talk’. ⁴ In its most extreme form, this emphasis on activity has been translated into ‘educational kinesiology’, in which constant physical movement is seen to have a direct, beneficial effect on learning, often at the expense of content-based curriculum. ⁵ While this literature points to a consideration of the corporeal dimensions of education, it does so in ways that ideologically conflates ‘activity’ with effective learning while casting bodily stillness as passivity indicative of ineffective learning.