Learning Learning 『学習の学習』 28(1): Learner’s Voices

Silence, Voice, and Writing
Leena Karlsson,
Helsinki University
Email:<karlsson.leena.k@gmail.com>

Chika Hayashi,
Seikei University
Email: <chayashi@bus.sei
kei.ac.jp

The Independent Learning Association (ILA) 2018 was held at Kobe Women’s University from the 5th to 8th September
in 2018. Due to the heavy typhoon that hit Japan at the beginning of September, a number of conferences werecancelled not only in Japan but other countries. Fortunately ILA 2018 took place although the schedule needed somechanges.
On September 7th, we gave our joint plenary titled “A Collaborative Reflection on Our Professional Journeys with
Learners' Voices.” When we were invited as plenary speakers, we were informed that it was the first endeavour to havea joint, collaborative plenary at ILA. Wondering how it would work and what we could co-construct, we started tointerweave the two threads. We thought of our communication and preparing for the plenary as an engagement in“doing collective biography” via dialogic emails. Our first contact with our potential audience happened, when we wereinvited to write a “prologue” (which we later called “A meeting of hearts and minds”) mainly to give readers of Learning
Learning a glimpse into our journey of exploration towards the plenary (Hayashi & Karlsson, 2018). This was our firstcollaborative writing effort. We had hoped that some readers might have gotten a touch of our complexly interwoven
emotions on the journey towards our joint plenary. And so we gave our plenary!

1. Missing a piece: Pursuing the meaning of silence
Chika: Immediately after our joint plenary ended, I realised that the room was full of silence. If my memory serves
me correctly, nobody was applauding. I had attended several conferences and listened to various kinds of plenary talk,but this ending full of silence was my first experience. On reflection, I feel a sense of accomplishment every time I give a
presentation, as do most people. However, I have to say that I felt awkward about the situation at the front of theroom, confused about how to react to the silence (or pretend not to realise it at all) because this was a completely
different ending from what I had expected. Actually, it was my first time to leave the room with such awkward feelings.
What caused the silence? Was the content overwhelming and uninteresting? Was the audience just tired after listening
to our one-hour talk? Had we perhaps disclosed too much in our personal stories? Was our talk too fast to understand?
Was the talk successful overall? I was asking myself, but these questions that I came up with indicate that myimmediate reaction was not positive.
Leena: I remember the silence. I remember how I was trying to first smile, then not to smile. It was me who had
said the very last words. I had spoken about Naoko Aoki, I had finished with the lyrics of a song, I had spoken out her
words: Let’s keep autonomy stories alive. That is, if my memory serves me right. If what I did was taken to be asking fora silence in Naoko’s memory and honour, then the silence was good. But at the moment when the talk was finishedthere was no way of knowing. Because the organizers had asked people to hurry to the next thing, because we hadtaken too long, because… I was stunned and remember seeing how somebody came to talk to you, Chika, to ask you aquestion. I hovered there for a while, then sneaked out into the corridor. A colleague who hadn’t been listening was
sitting and typing in the hall. My answer to a friendly “How did it go?” was a stunned “Nobody applauded.” Would weever know what the true meaning of that silence was?
Chika: “Silence is golden”—this is a common cultural belief and practice in Japan. As far as I know, this is based on a
Buddhist idea that “novice” priests need to maintain silence and devote themselves to special training to be “real”
priests until they completely master special skills and manners as a priest. In my everyday life, I admit that I am

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accustomed to silence in class and meetings, but the silence both Leena and I had experienced in Kobe was completely
different.
On the last day of the ILA conference, Leena and I explored Kobe city (and enjoyed shopping!), chatting about manythings such as our families and workplaces. (Do you remember we even dropped in at a cozy coffee shop and our chatcontinued almost forever over a cup of coffee? I still remember the delightful aroma of coffee we enjoyed together!)Turning this way and that in Kobe city as a stranger, I seemed to be waiting for the right time to talk to Leena about themeaning of silence which I could not get out of my mind at all. I think it was me who broke another “silence” andstarted to talk about the silence we had experienced. I clearly remember that you told me in a soft but firm voice that
we would find out the true meaning of silence after a while. You even said that the audience also would understand thetrue meaning of silence after several years, which reminded me of the “parallel process” we had discussed in our
Learning Learning piece just before the ILA conference (see Hayashi & Karlsson, 2018). I was convinced that ourmeanings of unspoken and nonverbal messages about silence and its various connotations would be transmitted andeven shared in due course.
Leena: On our exploration of rainy Kobe we were talking, sharing stories in yet another way from the days before,
including our plenary. This was more intimate, not done in front of an audience or through writing stories to be later
shared in front of an audience. A Japanese coffee shop was a novel experience for me, and we were, I felt, truly
becoming friends.
In the plenary, we had both emphasized the importance of learners’ voices, including their feelings and emotions.
We had, at length, talked about how we both aim at truly “hearing” students’ insider experiences and their learner
voices. We had written about this in our prologue as well. But now we had had to listen to the silence of our audienceand needed to “hear” their collective inner experience. We both struggled. And yes, Chika, you broke the silence of thelast moment of our plenary. It was important that we verbalised our embarrassment and admitted to not “hearing”
what the voice of the audience was trying to say. A colleague who had been listening to us immediately said to me that
she thought it was meant to be a two-minute silence to remember Naoko. I think that her words gave me comfort andan understanding of sorts was developing in my heart and mind.
When the two of us talked in the coffee shop, we started moving back to what we had come to see as sharedunderstandings and in thinking about educational stories we were looking into the future. At the moment, I feel that
there is never one true meaning for a silence. This is true of the Kobe silence as well. And, we have the same saying in
Finnish: Silence is golden. In fact, the Finnish silence can be read about in a book (The Silent Finn) written by two
linguists, Lehtonen and Sajavaara, in 1982. So I know what a silence can feel like in a classroom with Finnish students!
By the way, wasn’t it on this walk that meeting each other in Helsinki was mentioned?
Chika: The Kobe silence was always in my mind and even echoed (of course, soundlessly). I guess it was the same asyou, Leena. Looking back on our plenary and looking for the meaning of silence like the story of Silverstein’s (2006) “TheMissing Piece,” I came across some reflective writings on our joint plenary in Learning Learning, and Self-Access
Learning Journal, respectively.
■ Maria Giovanna Tassinari & Christian Ludwig (2018)“Opening an authentic dialogue with learners and sharing their own personal stories, they encourage learners
to find their own (inner) voices [……] Leena and Chika’s such a reflective journey as the “textual friendship”(ibid.) they developed through their virtual and textual communication illustrates. [……] Their plenary wasmuch more than passing on knowledge and raising questions as they let the audience participate in their very
personal “process of re-storying [their] professional pasts as practitioners, researchers and persons” (ibid.: p.
34).” (p. 72)■ Elizabeth Schlingman (2018)“This honest and engaging presentation, made more impressive by the fact that Karlsson and Hayashi live on
opposite sides of the globe and …” (p. 449)

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Learning Learning 『学習の学習』 28(1): Learner’s Voices
The three participants’ reflective writings give a glimpse of their inner voices that Leena and I had been looking for.
The importance of transparency and authenticity that both Leena and I emphasised and embodied in our joint plenary
were not merely transmitted as Maria and Christian describe, but more importantly, it was mutually shared at least
with the three participants. Reading their writings, I came to think that the Kobe silence may have been a sign of ourcollaborative and reflective moment and endeavour. The audience would have been engaged in the “parallel process,”going back and forth between the present and the past in pace with our wandering stories. They may have looked backon their own personal and professional histories related to teaching and learning, and explored critical incidents as they
gradually emerged as the “fellow passengers” in our collaborative journey. So, perhaps the silence was one of bothindividual and collaborative reflection.
As you said Leena, in Kobe I also truly felt that we were bound more tightly with the magic drink (coffee!) and wealready started talking about Helsinki as our next destination. To my surprise, I landed in Helsinki airport just one year
after our joint plenary. It was September 2nd, 2019—a sunny but a bit chilly afternoon for me.

2. From ILA to Finland: Puzzles, New Encounters and New Challenges
Leena: I, too, read the texts in Learning Learning and Self-Access Learning Journal with a refreshed understanding about
the silence. Our audience had been travelling with us with their own personal memories, histories, experiences, theirwhole autobiographies. Our individual professional and personal stories and, as Elizabeth Schlingman writes, our
virtually and textually shared, and thus entangled, story had resonated with them. Thinking back to our need to look for“the missing piece”, Chika, I feel very strongly and palpably how fragile our stories of teaching and learning always are.
It is, however, this vulnerability as the tellers that also gives positive hope: there are always listeners with whom thestory will resonate.
And a year later you landed in Helsinki and our virtual story continued as a live story. For me it was so enjoyable tointroduce my colleagues, the Language Centre and, in particular, ALMS counsellors and students to you. And Hetti, mydog, who loved you from the very first moment.
It was great to have you sit in my ALMS Opening Session with my theology students. I don’t always wholeheartedly
enjoy having visitors in my classroom because I also tend to feel a bit nervous. Now, it was different. I felt my shy andsilent students and I were safe with you. The group you were observing, like any faculty group, is always very diverse interms of language skills and potential anxieties: not everyone is feeling comfortable in the session when it starts. Somebring a lot of baggage with them. A lot of pedagogical sensitivity is needed and observation can make this a bit
problematic. Not with you, Chika!
Your visit to my Opening session was the beginning for a small project which we also planned to write about one
day. At the moment, May 2020, I am struggling with an article that is a rewrite of something I had already finishedwriting when you came to Helsinki. It was the educational story I had referred to in the Kobe plenary:“My current research work is happening round the ideas of arts-based language, using poetic language, mindful
and attentive listening in narrative inquiry, and how an ethical know-how can be developed using these as inspirations
in research writing (Reed & Speedy, 2011). This is work in progress that is at a beginning stage with a text with theworking title Laura, the girl who wrote the fear. Laura is a diarist, a creative writer, an explorer and experimenter withwriting in English, the girl who suffered from language anxiety but found her voice and used it as an expression of her
autonomy.”
The text, written along the lines in the above paragraph, was not accepted for publication by a particular journal on
the basis of it being too experimental and “not interesting to our readers.” I am now trying to rewrite it for anotherjournal. At the moment, I am pondering about (non-native) academic writing, about narrative educational stories, andwhat kind of qualitative writing is considered “interesting”, acceptable, and publishable in academia. Chika, am I making
sense when I bring up writing for publication? We wanted to write together about our students’ Japanese-Finnish DIY.
What are your passions and concerns as an academic writer?
Chika: My first visit to Helsinki was memorable, enjoyable and informative! Prior to my departure, you kindly
arranged everything for me, asking what I would like to do in terms of my academic (and personal) interests and needs.
You may not have realised this, or this may be your natural manner, but I felt that you were carefully listening to myinner voice. I also thought that this is your way of approaching students ahead of and during your counselling sessions.

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Getting a sense of your educational approach, I was welcomed to your first session with your theology students on mysecond day in Helsinki.
It was the first encounter for all of us, but as you have described, Leena, I was not nervous either and felt safety inthe classroom. I think I was an observer, but I felt as if I were auditing your first lesson. Do you remember that one ofyour students asked about your learning history? I think you didn’t expect to be asked such a personal question at thevery beginning of the first lesson. But you answered when and how you started to learn English in a friendly but sincere
attitude, which I believe sent an implicit and explicit message to your students about you as a practitioner, counsellor,
and person. Also, another magic item (not coffee but chocolates this time!) that you prepared for your students helped
to establish a trusting relationship between you and your students as well as among students! Again, it reminds me ofSilverstein’s (2006) The Missing Piece. By having one chocolate and sharing parts of it, some of them might havethought that each member is an important part of the team. Smiling at this “sweet” story and taking a note of teachingstrategies and critical incidents in the class, I began envisaging a new English course starting from April 2020.
Yes, not only your students, but also your wonderful colleagues kindly welcomed me in a friendly manner! I
immediately felt a warm and caring environment that both you and your colleagues co-constructed—Yes, it was a lively
community bound together with strong ties. I enjoyed observing some of your colleagues’ classes and also talking
about their classes over coffee and lunch. I really appreciate that you kindly connected me to your colleagues!
We also talked about our potential Do-it-Yourself project when I visited your home! I was trying to expand ourinteractive process to a much wider context and wondering if it would be possible to involve our students somehow.
Moreover, I had chances to talk with some of your students after the classes I observed. The feeling I had in talking withthe students made me realise that there are some commonalities between your Finnish students and my Japanese
students. I have no intention to make a sweeping generalisation, but students in both countries are kind of modest but
they have their own ideas and opinions which are probably not expressed or shared so often. I immediately thoughtthat these similarities would work effectively because students would be able to naturally establish an equal andhealthy relationship for their mutual learning without one student dominating.
With lovely Hetti sitting next to us (probably carefully listening to us and hoping for success), we opened ournotebooks and started to make a concrete plan. I soon realised that we were heading in the same direction even if we
didn’t say anything directly. We were also naturally trying to leave some space for our students to make decisions andalso negotiate with each other about how to proceed with the project. Like you, I also invited my students to join the
Do-It-Yourself project in exactly the same way as you.
So, our interests in learners’ voices including emotions and feelings face challenges. It is often the case that texts
related to learners’ voices are as a simple record of their learning processes and get judged as “not academic” as you
say, Leena. This is a big challenge for us indeed. With a careful choice of appropriate research methods and techniquessuch as interviews, diaries and drawings, we are able to step into an internal aspect of individual learners’ minds. We
understand that those are the keys for us to approach and see learners’ internal voices and establish a symbiotic
relationship, which is an important basis for learner counselling, advising and teaching.
I think this is similar to the reading theory that “reading is an interactive process.” As a reader of students’ inner
voices, we activate our schemata and connect their stories narrated verbally and through drawings to our own learning
experiences, several theories, some tips we got in conferences, our former students’ failures and successes and otheracademic papers to find the best practice in a specific context and case. There may be a gap between research andpractice. I’ve just remembered Stevick’s (1980) observation that “Success depends less on materials, techniques andlinguistic analyses, and more on what goes on inside and between the people in the classroom.” (p. 4)
Leena: The beautiful analysis in your latest entry, Chika, very strongly resonates with what I am struggling to write
about, or touch upon, in the article that is on my computer screen right now. We teachers, advisers, counsellors “asreaders of our students’ inner voices” indeed struggle with how to show, not only tell about, the internal voices in ourpapers. The challenge is how to “convert” into academic text our research done using research tools and methods likediaries, drawings, letters, stories, creative writing, counselling notes and recordings, research discussions, “dream data.”
When we re-story, we should be brave and stick with evocative storytelling ourselves and this still, amazingly often,
seems to be a problem for journals. But we’ll keep trying!

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I have to confess that all my energy has gone into rewriting the article I keep referring to. In fact, I’ve been “writing”
it for two years now. And I do not think I’m ever going to finish and send it off to be (not) published! In fact, it is turning
into a text about “different” academic writing and the voice is now mainly a practitioner-researcher’s voice, which she
uses as an expression of her own autonomy as a counsellor, as a non-native academic writer. The first version was
telling the parallel stories of two writers, myself and Laura, the girl who wrote the fear. I talked about her in Kobe as you
might remember. I haven’t yet given up on student voices but have to ponder further on how Laura and potentiallyanother student could be written into this “new” story. Writing is a huge struggle and I might be missing a focus and apoint but seem to keep going back to the file, like a cat scratching a sore spot.
Chika: It is obvious that we are always with our learners. As you describe, Leena, we need to analyse and interpretthe data to share it with readers without distorting the learner voices expressed in their “products.” In a sense, we are a
mediator between participants (learners) and readers and take responsibility for all the “interactive” processes.
However, as you said, we also need to convert the data into academic text. Those who engage with learner voices face
the same challenges and dilemmas but both of us dare to choose to devote ourselves to understanding learner voices
and move forward together with whatever voices learners have!
Leena, I was thinking about “learner voices in this COVID-19 pandemic.” Due to this unprecedented situation, we
have been struggling to adjust ourselves not only to the new normal but also to the new teaching/learning
environment. Likewise, we also need to change or transform our ways of approaching our learners. In my case, I’ve
been conducting online lessons using Zoom since the middle of April. To be honest Leena, I cannot really feel thepresence of my students during the classes although I was aware that our interaction should be clearly different fromwhat we used to have before. I cannot physically feel or touch students or directly interact with students.
Any assignments related to their learning are perfectly typed and sent to a Learning Management System as digital
data. Unlike the previous years, I cannot receive their assignments directly from my students, which equally and sadly
means to me that I cannot really feel their authentic feelings and emotions. It is my first time in my teaching career that
I feel I’m away from my students. All the perfectly typed documents I receive from my students every week are a set ofsimple, artificial and monotonous documents to me; I cannot feel their particularity even if the assignments are related
to their own learning history or their opinions about certain topics. Of course, I know that students put so much effort
and time into their assignments and I appreciate their contributions during this difficult time though. I cannot really see
how they work on each assignment, but I can imagine that they rewrite their sentences, carefully choosing more
appropriate words as they type.
It is a very natural thing, but this means to me that their spontaneous and authentic voices are easily altered tosomething different or even erased completely. The strength of their hand writings, their use of space, their choice ofcolour pens and drawings are what I’m missing. I’m missing even dirt like coffee or sweets on some papers I received
from my former students, which gave a glimpse of their personality and personal lifestyle. That kind of small but
significant “trace” tells me something which is not explicitly expressed but implicitly shared through each student’s
product. As for my feedback, I myself typed my comments in the same Word file and sent it back to each student,
strongly feeling that some important things are really missing …
Struggling with this challenging situation and pursuing alternative ways, last week I decided to print out all the
documents that students had sent to me. I then wrote my comments manually using various color pens. Yes, I decided
to be transparent myself in this small way and share my own voice not verbally but visibly. I’m wondering whether andhow it will work…

3. What is Writing?
Leena: Chika, I simply love your new angle, the effects of COVID-19 on our students’ and our own embodied being in
the world and our (written/Inner) voices! It’s so very tangible to me, the whole destruction and loss of teaching andcounselling as meetings of minds and bodies. I love the way you write about the “perfectly typed” texts with no tracesof life in or on them (the dirt, the lovely dirt, the wonderful messes are missing). “Simple, artificial and monotonous,”
yes, that’s what writing can become when we make it possible for writers to use templates, models, when they can just“copy and paste” in their minds, if not in reality, when they never leave an Other’s influence, when the whole English-

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speaking and English–writing world is writing on their screens, when “help”, when “inspiration” is only a click away.
When the product becomes more important than the process, again this happens but for different reasons than before.
In my own work, I got more and more interested in asking the students to freewrite, to write in order to think, toclaim their voice, enriched with the native language, but authentic, not copied (Karlsson, 206; 2017). More and more I
was inspiring writing that would be messy and colourful and could be worked with endlessly and “improved” but not
immediately, but with time, first reflecting and then “editing”, first generating and then polishing, first making a messand then cleaning up. This writing approach makes use of pictures and coloured pens and scrap books and glittery
pictures.
Do you remember the ALMS Diaries in the session I had with my students when you visited? And you have beengetting those kinds of spontaneous texts and drawings back from your students! And we have both enjoyed thereading! We have been reading and thinking with their stories, living their stories in the pictures and colours andhandwriting, the scribbles. I think we need to print these pages soon and both take pictures of how we handle them,
what visible traces we leave (I can promise footprints of coffee mugs and other dirt!). In fact, could this be the next
phase: printing what we have and taking time to READ, UNDERSTAND, BE SURPRISED and DIGEST and do ourhandwork? Will we see what inner voices are expressed in our entries? Will we be able to spot and mark each other’s
feeling voices (a lovely term I came across again just now by Elbaz-Luwisch, 2014)? In my email I said this, right? On 24
May I wrote:
We both need to print out this diary, read it with a pen (or many coloured ones) in hand in order to understand andfeel what's going on in the text, what (inner) voices are being expressed. When we do it, taking our time, I'm sure
we will know what to do with our dialogic diary, themes will emerge…
As I am (almost) retired now and not active in teaching, I can see how these times of upheaval in our lives and ineducation make me stop and sigh, but not necessarily think of immediate solutions to the problems. I also want to
attach a bit of text from my article to this email, the one I’m struggling with, just to hear your immediate reaction. The
thing to know is that the article is experimental and I am including my own writing exercises from a course in creative
academic writing I took in the research story, using my own writing as data. This bit might be of interest because it isabout voice, although a spontaneous writing exercise. I ponder on unique voices in educational stories, how we cankeep our own unique, although incomplete, voices as practitioner-researchers and also allow our students to keep
theirs. I write how previous student stories always echo in our texts and how it’s always a chorus of voices in narrativeinquiry that the readers will hear. You’ll see that I worry about silence, I truly worry about how to write about it in mytext and also about not hearing the sound of Laura’s silence, perhaps even silencing her story.
Chika: I was thinking about Freire’s (2000) Pedagogy of the Oppressed. He demonstrates the dichotomous
relationship between teachers and students and defines it as “the banking model of education.” In that model, theexpected roles of students in a traditional classroom are clearly described in contrast to those of teachers. One of themis that students are expected to listen to teachers. This means that the student role is to be silent and their voices are
not expected to be heard. Then I came up with an idea of two types of silence: intentional silence and oppressive
silence. In the former case, we are supposed to read between lines and keep quiet so as to maintain harmony. For
example, students who believe that “the nail that sticks out gets hammered down” would choose not to express theiropinions so as not to stand out or to be isolated from others in a group or class. On the other hand, in the latter case,people are forced to keep quiet to play a role imposed on them like Freire’s example of students described above.
Whatever types of silence it is, silence includes (un)intentionally unspoken messages and implicit or explicit meanings,
and appear and disappear any decisions a learner makes and a sign of autonomy behind their authenticity.
Leena: Permission to write, that’s the name I decided to give to my article! I think that what you and I are talking
about now is about the right to write, the right to write academic texts, too, “differently”, in a more human language. I
did send my article and will hear in due time if this journal, if these reviewers, might consider that some of their readers
might be interested. I’ll keep you posted, Chika! But even to be given a vague permission is not enough; one needs tobe able to call oneself a writer by claiming one’s voice and right to write. There are always multiple social and cultural
norms that won’t allow a writer writing against them to quite use her voice because there’s always the possibility to be
rejected. I guess that somebody from the margins of academia, like myself, a non-native writer, a practitioner-

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researcher, not a real researcher, will always hear the nagging internal censor’s voice in her head: “This is not going tobe accepted, and for a good reason!”
So what can we do? Keep writing and sending our papers to different journals. Live with the rejections andsuggestions of re-writing and editing. There are also different rejections: rejections for a good reason and for the wrong
reasons. The wrong reasons often have to do with strong expectations of conventional and conforming writing only. I
believe that the world of education needs experimental writings, texts emerging from experience; it needs narrativeand stories, memories and dreams, the use of imagination and creativity. I think it needs feeling voices (Elbaz-Luwish,2014). It needs practitioners who listen to the inner voices of their students and have micro-dialogues with their own
inner voices. If we write in our feeling voices arising out of our inner dialogues, perhaps the readers will hear our inner
voice, and perhaps they will also hear our students’ inner voices in our re-storying. Perhaps it’s about a resonance ofexperiential stories (Conle, 2000) in the world of learning and teaching (advising/counselling for) foreign languages?
Chika, it is a perfect point to bring in Freire! Silence indeed is about power. And here it is learner autonomy thatgives me hope! A student who has autonomy, a permission to act autonomously, can choose to be silent and weteachers/counsellors have to have the skill and sensitivity to listen to that silence. Granger (2011) writes about silence
as “a presence rather than a lack, as a methodology rather than a pathology.” Isn’t it also a permission to be(autonomously) silent that students need to have in classrooms and counselling offices? We are the ones who can givethat permission. But we are also the ones who can reject and refuse silence, force our thinking, our meaning and power
on students.
Silence is an ethical question in education, in practice and research. Giving thought to and exploring how welistened to a certain silence might be the starting point to understand it, the slippery and obscure meanings of silencesin different contexts, our own prejudices included. Which takes us back to the beginning, to Kobe, and the moment at
the end of our plenary.

4. Collaborative Reflection After Writing …
Leena: I’m looking at a printed version of our dialogue so far. Colours, underlinings, circles and words are trying to tell astory of a collaborative writing project, a project which is experimental in terms of what form the end product, an
article will/could/might/should take. Writing has many meanings here, writing is the inquiry in the project. Our writing
takes the form of a dialogue, consistently so. And yet, there are fragments, episodes, small stories by Chika and yetothers by Leena inside the big story called Silence. Because I am not a particularly visual person, my use of colour isvery modest and pragmatic, I go for words, this time I used a red pen to write my words/reactions/ideas/interpretations, which is very interesting as I don't use red as a teacher at all!
We both seem to have an agenda, or an underlying silence/passion/issue wanting to find a form in words; these are
not exactly the same but they do emerge from the dialogue for both of us. For me, it's definitely writing, academic andpersonal, students' and practitioners', writing as written voices, feeling voices. I do not venture to say what's yours,
Chika, perhaps you disagree with the whole idea of agendas (a negative word but I mean it as a neutral way of saying
we want to focus on certain issues). For me, the other issue, which also gets coloured in yellow (=hope) or orange(=vitality), is minds and bodies, learning as a bodily process, embodied encounters in counselling/teaching, which wemight not have in the future. No colours, pens, handwritten texts, breathing the same air, smelling each other. I guess
I'm not alone here…
Chika: Our collaborative writing is an explorative process of our own and collaborative voices. We have spent somany years exploring our common interests, students' inner voices, but we may not have been so conscious of thepresence of our own voices or we simply didn't have any chances to express or share our own voices at least in a
written form and even didn't expect our voices would go across oceans and continents, but we have still continued our
dialogue even if we didn't know what our end product would be like.
The dialogue started with my voice and included the emotions I had in Kobe. In response to that, your voice also
included your real voice of the negative feeling you had after our plenary session. In this way, our monologue graduallyturned into dialogue, expanding it with the others' voices like Elizabeth, Giovanna, and Christian, who had shared thesame space and time with us in Kobe. As researchers, we understand the importance of triangulation, so we might have
tried to explore the meaning of silence, which is our main concern, from various perspectives. However, it might have

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been simply out of our curiosity as human beings that we wished to understand how the audience felt about ourplenary.
As the dialogue goes on, not only voices of ourselves as plenary speakers, but also various voices emerge, such aspractitioner-researchers, counsellors, writers, teachers, and human beings. It was like a soap opera and each player
appeared one after another and expressed their own emotions and feelings from their own perspectives. Theirstruggles, challenges, passions and hopes are well reflected in our collaborative dialogue. As we responded, repeated,paraphrased and summarised what they expressed, we reflected on our specific teaching/learning environments like amirror image. In this way, multilevel voices are echoed, mingled and resonated.
Leena: Thank you for the great insights into silence, Chika. I've read your reflections with interest. You don’t
mention colours at all, this is the only thing I’m surprised about. These months, even years, that we’ve spent with first
the idea of silence and now the writing project are indeed a rich story of professional and personal development. I can
see and feel a web of experiences forming and resonating and I can hear a chorus of voices joining in, speaking and atother times listening, silently pondering. Voices in us and around us.
The starting point for us was indeed the need for ”triangulation” as researchers and plenarists but also humancuriosity or perhaps both? For me, this dialogue has given a peace of mind about the original Silence of Kobe. It has
provided me a space for reflecting and critically looking back at the silence and its repercussions. During our dialoguing
I’ve written three papers and been engaged in inquiries about themes that are not directly related to silence but alsowith one that has to do with being "silenced" as a writer. This silencing, or more accurately, the feeling of being silenced
has to do both with my inner voice and my written voice as an expression of my autonomy as a practitioner-researcher.
Our text as a “soap opera” is a telling metaphor, Chika!
Because we’ve shared our feelings and opinions and ever-evolving ideas about silence and its meaning, I’ve started
to hear novel echoes of voices having to do with English as an academic lingua franca and writing as a non-native
practitioner. During this time, I wrote one text in Finnish about (learning) diaries in ALMS and felt much more expressive
and playful in writing it than I do when I use English. Ideas emerging from our “dialogic diary via emails” have writtenthemselves, in deliberately reformed ways, in the other texts and papers I have been writing and vice versa. Two ofthem have now been published and one is still “becoming” an article. The article I mention struggling with will be
published soon and the one in Finnish has just come out. There is a writing story (Richardson & St. Pierre, 2005) or astory about writing here that I'd be interested to pursue now that as a “third age” teacher, or rather a third-age
practitioner- researcher, I have all the time in the world.

5. Closure
Chika: Like our joint plenary at ILA 2018, this piece of writing reflects our authentic voice narrated from themultidimensional aspects of ourselves: teachers, counsellors, researchers and human beings. Whatever aspects it is, wehave been constantly pondering, wondering and facing issues, but we are surely moving forward. In my research study(Hayashi, 2010), one of the participants (a 15-year-old junior high school student) drew rock climbing on a sheet of apaper and explained that rock climbing is closely related to English language learning. If we need to climb a rock byourselves, it would be very challenging and hectic; we might easily give up on the way to the top unless we do not havea strong motivation and can maintain it. However, if we do that with someone with similar interests and goals, thewhole process will be more dynamic, motivating and more importantly enjoyable! Likewise, our second piece of writing
demonstrates the power of dialogic inquiry between Leena and me, which always empowers me both professionallyand personally even under the unprecedented circumstance of the COVID-19 pandemic!
Leena: The experience of writing this text with you, Chika, and our whole two-year-process, reminds me of a
project we did in ALMS and reported on in Bradley et al. (2015). This was an exploration of our (possible) counsellor
selves, of our beliefs and attitudes but also a way of visioning our professional futures. Most importantly, we wanted to
explore how a scholarship of language counselling (Vieira, 2010) could be developed via professional discussions andcollaborative writing. The way the two of us have worked together since we started preparing the plenary has been asimilar effort in developing our scholarships of teaching and pedagogies for autonomy across the oceans andcontinents. It has been a project of sharing and caring, of peer mentoring, or learning together: learning about
ourselves, about teaching, about autonomy, about writing, and about life, both our personal and academic lives.

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Learning Learning 『学習の学習』 28(1): Learner’s Voices
Acknowledgements
We would like to thank Andy Barfield for his insightful comments on the first draft of our collaborative writing and more
importantly for making it possible for us to engage in the joint plenary at ILA 2018 in Kobe, which was a seed of ourcollaboration! We would also like to express our gratitude to the Learning Learning editorial team, especially HughNicoll and Ken Ikeda, for sharing their thoughtful perspectives and for providing kind support in finalising this piece ofwriting.
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