The first discussion about the workshop

Just before the September meeting of the project group started, that was taking place at the university site, I was chatting to Sean and Kerry as we waited for the other group members to arrive. Sean mentioned that he thought this meeting might be difficult because of one specific item on the agenda: they were going to be proposing that there be no council representative in attendance at a workshop they were

planning to hold with members of the general public, and he thought that the council officers might complain. Although no names were mentioned, previous comments left a clear impression with me that it would be Nina who would be the one likely to complain, given the histories of interaction discussed in the previous chapter.

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When we reached the agenda item in question, Kerry introduced the idea of the workshop that was being planned to take place in a month's time, and asked for names of people who the council officers might like to invite. The first suggestion came from Nina, who proposed inviting the whole of the 'Friends of the site' group that she and Paul had been developing as support for their longer-term project work. The group comprised local business people, residents and other useful contacts who had some interest in the site, and who might be influential in securing resources in the future. Their attendance would be useful, Nina suggested, because the group had expressed a desire to be more involved in the co-inquiry work and moreover had a role to advise the council and scrutinise the work.

This was not quite the response that had apparently been anticipated by Sean and Kerry in our pre-meeting chat. Moreover, to take a short detour, this moment of interplay also led to a responsiveness in the conversation between Sean and Nina that is at odds with their discursive construction of each other as characters. To illustrate this briefly, I provide some detail from the video recording. On her utterance of the word 'scrutinise', Sean sat back in his chair with a shake of his head and said that he found that word problematic. As he said this, he raised his hands, palms face out, in what looked like a sign of resistance. Nina responded by explaining she was just trying to find a way to reconcile the two processes that the council and the university were developing. After a brief discussion, Sean suggested that the university team run some kind of session specifically for the Friends group, which would be separate from the workshop. All the attendees agreed that this would be a good idea. Nina's suggestion therefore had some positive resolution, despite the temporary conflict about wording. It is worth noting, therefore, that while both Sean and Nina often characterised the other as unchanging and inflexible, there were many occasions like

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this when Sean would accommodate Nina's ideas and suggestions in the project meeting conversations. It was not the case that Nina simply remained silent, nor ineffective, during the project conversations.

Shortly after this, it was Paul, Nina's County Council colleague, who suggested someone from the council should attend the workshop. The following extract starts just before this point in the transcript.

Alison: Can I point out at this point that I'm I've got no nominations ((laughs)) because all of us are council .. people and and it would come through the people that are at, my .. I would like people who have actually engaged and left their details and are very keen

Paul: E- that's that's a point though, isn't it, is it, is it valid to have people from the council who have been involved in the process as well? Is it, is it not about the whole process or is it about the events that we've run?

Alison: If we're trying to just try something a bit different ... Paul: No I'm not, I'm just saying, just one person you know

Alison: Yeah I know what you're saying, yeah, but if we're trying to do

something different and we just want to .. put it out there and see what we get

Sean: My experience is that if there's someone there as a council representative it will change the dynamic considerably Martin: Definitely

Sean: not for the better, no um I um, that's no offence to anyone here Alison: No, no, that's fine

It was Alison rather than Sean that moved first to argue against the idea of council involvement. Nina did not speak in this interaction. I was interested that it had been Paul rather than her who had raised the issue of council attendance. When I asked him about this in our post-meeting conversation, Paul said actually it had been a

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'throwaway comment', an idea that had just come into his head at that point and he did not mind one way or the other really about attending.

When I asked her in our post-meeting conversation if there was anything she had stayed silent about, Nina did not mention the workshop at all. Instead, she made a general remark about the worth of speaking up:

'Well there are lots of things I could have said, the fundamental question is, am I going to row or just get myself through this and out, and leave it all behind. It's just a judgement.'

Kerry, on the other hand, did raise the topic of the workshop in our conversation after the meeting, which took place a few days later. In the section below, I discuss how she contextualised her account of silence in relation to uncertainty about the workshop organisation. I use her account as a comparison to other participants' comments about silence in relation to learning and expertise.