Making Noise for Solitude: Transformational Interruptions of Space for Social Justice

• In Event: 46.024 - Creating Spaces to Transform Social Justice Dissertation Research Into Teaching Practice

Abstract

There is a profound difference between solitude and isolation. In the face of standardization and the commodification of the body and brain, teachers and students need solitude, which can be defined as the time and space to just “be” and, in being, the body, mind, and soul heal and rejuvenate. In this state, thinking and creativity take place. Whitehead supports this idea: “The combination of imagination and learning normally requires some leisure, freedom from restraint, freedom from harassing worry, some variety of experiences, and the stimulation of other minds diverse in opinion and diverse in equipment” (1929, p. 91). In solitude, we reset ourselves, we enlighten ourselves and then share that energy with others, through teaching and learning and reading and writing. In the act of solitude, doing nothing is something. Being still, wandering, and loafing are all acceptable and encouraged. We need to interrupt the curriculum in order to make time and space for solitude. Arendt writes, “For if no other test but the experience of being active, no other measure but the extent of sheer activity were to be applied to the various activities within the vita active, it might well be that thinking as such would surpass them all” (1958, p. 325). Clearly, Arendt supports that thinking looks like an inactive process, but it is not. We need to allow our students to sit and be idle, to create noise to their own rhythm in their minds. We must interrupt the standardized curriculum by creating spaces of solitude that will grant teachers and students intellectual freedom.
Solitude is the fertile soil where knowledge is planted and humanity is harvested; but the soil we until in education is barren. When starving souls remain without the nourishment provided by solitude, they seek shelter in the dangerous wasteland of isolation, where there is no noise, only deafening silence. The confines and confusion created by isolation often lead to behaviors and conditions that damage and destroy the body, the mind, and the soul. The need for solitude is a concern of social justice if we want education to occur in ways that do not isolate teachers and students. Isolation is where we find ourselves when we do not get the solitude we need. It is a desolate wasteland, where we become dehydrated and malnourished; where our souls and minds become shriveled and we feel exposed and lost and hopeless. Arendt says that isolation is “the fundamental inability to act at all” (1968, p. 474). Teachers and students suffer this isolation on a daily basis because they are not able to find the solitude they need to exercise intellectual freedom in these insufferable conditions of standardization. By teaching for social justice, we must fight for the time and space of solitude by creating noise and interruptions in the curriculum.

Author

• Stacey Tucker Brown, Georgia Southern University