Silence in Complex Social Systems
8th Grade, Unit 5 

Navigating Power, Designing Liberation

This unit invites students to investigate silence as a living dialect—a language that both reveals and shapes the hidden architecture of power in their school community. Here, eighth graders become ethnographers of the unsaid, studying how silence functions as currency, weapon, and sanctuary across different social locations. Through participatory action research, they'll document whose quiet is interpreted as resistance versus disengagement, which bodies are granted stillness as a right versus penalized for it as defiance.

Key Transformations:

• Recognize silence as amplified testimony—reading institutional patterns in who is permitted quiet versus who is silenced

• Cultivate stillness as strategic dissent—mastering when silent presence disrupts more powerfully than speech

• Practice space-making as radical hospitality—designing environments where access to quiet is equitably distributed

• Reframe initiatives as living blueprints—creating projects that transform school systems rather than accommodate them

Students emerge as critical architects, using silence to expose then rewire the hidden grammars of power. Their final projects become embodied arguments for middle schools as sites of contemplative resistance—where the right to quiet becomes the right to self-determination.