The productivity of stillness : composure and the scholarly habitus

![CDATA[We live in an era in which ' active learning' has become accepted as a fundamental goal of good teaching, From early childcare to university education,' '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.' Yet in forcgrounding 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 class¬room to access resource material, is displaying involvement in the learning process, Stillness, therefore, is viewed as a problem, a 'disease' of 'chalk and talk'.' 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' 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. In this chapter we do not engage in a critique of ' active learning' per se; nor do we want to revisit the opposition between 'traditional' and 'progressive' educational methods bemoaned by John Dewey 70 years ago. Rather, we want to examine the role of stillness in processes of learning and its relation to bodily discipline, move¬ment and pedagogy. We take seriously Foucault's' insistence on the productivity of discipline in the formation of subjects with capacities and examine the impact of discipline on the bodies of young children in the early years of school. We argue that a certain form of stillness - what we shall call the state of composure - is crucial to intellectual labour and the formation of what we term, following Bourdieu, the scholarly habitus, as a system of dispositions appropriate to educational endeavour.]]