Listening Pedagogies Creative and Arts-Based Approaches for Education in Unstable Times

Introduction

Section One: Reciprocal Listening

1. Listening With Differences: The Small Body as Living Pedagogy

By Mitsy Chung

 2.  Listening as correspondence, gesture, artistry, and enchantment

By: Sylvia Kind & Johanna Po

3. Listening With River-Child-Clay-Swan Encounters: Collaging as a Reciprocal Listening Practice for Thinking With Everyday Colonial Forces

By: Vanessa Wintoneak

4.  Acting on children’s voices to influence national early childhood education policy in Australia

By: Barblett, L.

Irvine, S.  

Hadley, F. 

Harrison, L J. 

Cartmel, J. 

5.  Listening as a rehumanizing practice in the teaching of mathematics

By: Kersti Tyson, Ph.D.  (Corresponding Author)

Allison Hintz

Andrea R. English

6. Reciprocal Listening: A Pedagogy of the Imagination for Times of Uncertainty

By: Gigi Schroeder Yu

Section Two: Embodied Listening

Poetic Encounter: Sage J Harlow: a slightly louder silence (variation 108)

7. Bodying Listening; Somatics in the Supermarket

 By Jo Pollitt  & Paea Leach

8. Listening to children, listening to trees 

By Abigail Hackett, Peter Kraftl, Steve Pool, & Jan White

9. Embodied and Collaborative Listening Practices with the More-than-Human World

 By Diana Chester  & Damien Ricketson 

10. Listening with Hea/r/tful Presence: A Piano Soundscape

By Jeeyeon Ryu

Section Three: The Right To Be Heard  

Poetic Encounter: Leslie Bishop: Listening

11.  Listening to Wisdom from the Past

By Christine P. Sims

12. Listening with Place

By Adrianne Bacelar de Castro

 13. Listening to Children through Publishing and the Arts: An exploration of the Kids’ Own Publishing model

 By: Kids Own; Jo Holmwood, Mary Branley, Naomi Draper, Maree Hensey

14.  Artist literacies as more-than-hearing (with-within-against the institution)

By: Lilly Blue

15. Rebuking Hegemonic Ideologies: Toward a Pedagogy of Intentionality of Listening

By Juana M. Reyes & Yin Lam Lee-Johnson

Biography

Mitsy KwangDae Chung is an artist, researcher, and early childhood educator. She is currently working towards her PhD in Curriculum Studies at the Faculty of Education, University of Western Ontario, Canada. Her doctoral research is funded by Canada’s Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council and an Ontario Graduate Scholarship. Her research interests focus on developing early childhood lived curricula through artistic experiences, especially drawings.

Geralyn Schroeder Yu is an associate professor of art education at the University of New Mexico's Art Department. Her research and teaching focus on aesthetic inquiry and collaboration, emphasizing affective connections among children, artists, and early childhood educators. She is also co-founder of the Collaborative Teachers Institute.

Jo Pollitt is a Vice Chancellor's Research Fellow with the Western Australian Academy of Performing Arts and Centre for People, Place & Planet at Edith Cowan University. She is creative director of #FEAS: Feminist Educators Against Sexism and author of The dancer in your hands < >.

There has probably never been a time, in our schools, when the reciprocal art of listening has mattered more. Our capacity to listen is everywhere being compromised, not only by AI, and by our addiction to our devices, but also by dangerous, populist autocrats, dictating what can and what can’t be heard, what can and can’t be acted on. This book is timely and it matters. It introduces listening as embodied, somatic, relational practice. Listening, as it is explored here, is artful, it is mobile, and it is open to the other and to difference. It opens up practices of relational creativity—both human and more-than-human, extending our capacity to respond to each other, and to the Earth itself. Through learning such arts of relational attunement, we can move beyond limited ways of knowing, to a more-than-human, regenerative time, a kinder time, a creative time, a generous time. This is a book for such a time.

 Bronwyn Davies, Honorary Professor, Universities of Melbourne and Western Sydney University

Listening Pedagogies invites us to consider and practice the skills necessary for doing transdisciplinarity. It requires an openness to new ideas, practices, and concepts, as well as the ability to revisit and reconsider what we think we know. Unlearning and allowing something to emerge becomes both method and mandate. Criss-crossing between, through, and beyond the chapters of this book is a practice we encourage readers to try. 

Mindy Blaise and Veronica Pacini-Ketchabaw, co-founders of the Common Worlds Research Collective

It begins in a thirdness. Three editors, attuned, listening not only to how the world teaches us to hear its interstices, but to that quality of the uncountable third. From here, they reach out, enticing others to be enjoined, to gather in the sonic frequency. For Charles Sanders Peirce, a thirdness is the quality of a sociality that carries with it the ineffable more-than of the direct encounter with the world. This is what Listening Pedagogies does: it listens to what moves between, in excess of what can be counted. And in this thirdness, it moves toward other ways of learning.

Dr. Erin Manning, Professor, Studio Arts, Film Studies, Faculty of Fine Arts, Concordia University

This is a rare gift of a book. By teasing out what it means to listen in different contexts and drawing on a range of creative and arts-based projects with human and environmental bodies, children and families, the contributors argue for the power of embodied, reciprocal and intergenerational listening. They invite readers to attune to the unstable world we inhabit and to see the value of taking the time to observe, engage and to deeply consider how listening, hearing and being heard can open new ways of being, and radically enhance our understandings of, and participation in, the world around us.

Run, don’t walk and get a copy. Everyone should read this book!

Professor Helena Grehan, Vice Chancellor’s Professorial Fellow, The Western Australian Academy of Performing Arts at Edith Cowan University

Listening Pedagogies has opened my eyes—from sincere listening among adults that I had learned from Indigenous elders of the arctic—to a pluriverse of listening practices—attentive, deep, embodied, intentional, reciprocal, relational, …—that are intergenerational and inclusive (of multiple languages, of ethnicities and ability, of the more-than-human relations). At times, pedagogy and politics are inseparable in this volume; one example connects listening to/with children to listening to/with elders—all to shape and transform state education policy for the revitalization of Indigenous languages. More than a guide to teaching, a number of chapters connect early childhood education to education and social transformation initiatives at community, state, and national scales; Kids’ Own publishing model is one such inspiring example. With contributions from the global North and the South, Listening Pedagogies is an effective guide to decolonizing education. It is an essential and inspiring read for our topsy-turvy time.

Subhankar Banerjee, editor of Arctic Voices: Resistance at the Tipping Point