The practice of silence as an educational tool: guidelines for competence-based education

Abstract

The characteristics of contemporary educational environments, abundant in activities and often-excessive use of digital technologies, highlight the need for providing psychophysical balance to the student inner experience, current situation that stimulates teachers’ interest to the consideration of silence as an educative act, crucial to any less saturated, and more balanced formative process. Current scientific literature is reviewed here about silence as an enhancer of neurophysiology, e.g.: on neurogenesis and default network inductor; and psychosocial development, e.g.: on self-regulative attentional skills and/or language processing quality; suggesting it already involves the preconditions to be systematically introduced as a pedagogical tool, a task still to be done and to which this paper tributes. For this goal, a brief review on the contemplative orientation in teaching and learning is exposed as a theoretical and practical framework interested in silence as a tool of learning, psychological growth, and social transformation, through awareness development and relational-ethical behavior. Some implications are described then for competence-based education, and the possibility of articulating the practice of silence with the development of procedural competences. Finally, some limitations are addressed in order to raise awareness of the best path to tread in promoting silence and its benefits for teaching and learning environments