Week 8 Practicum: Comfortable silence

A practicum with someone you trust and nothing to say — where the absence of talking feels grounding rather than empty

12 April 2027

Every experience so far in this course has been something you could, in principle, have alone. This one can’t be manufactured solo — it only exists between two people, which makes it the course’s first real test of whether introspection can say anything true about an experience that isn’t entirely yours.

No grant lands this week — funding runs on alternate weeks. If you’re drawing on money carried over from an earlier week to fund this practicum, see policies for the receipt requirement.

Before the practicum#

Choose someone you already trust enough that silence with them wouldn’t normally feel like a failure of conversation. Agree explicitly, before you start, not to fill gaps — this has to be a deliberate silence, not an accidental one that happens to work out.

In the practicum#

Sit together with no task and no phones for the full twenty minutes. Resist the urge to check whether it’s “working.” If it turns awkward, that’s data too — write down where the shift happened rather than abandoning the attempt.

Afterwards#

Compare notes with the other person honestly, including any place your accounts don’t match. A comfortable silence that only one of you experienced as comfortable is a different, and equally real, finding — and a useful one for the report due at the end of this unit.