This website brings together projects and resources to support the emerging discourse and practice of teaching and learning with/from sound. The content represents the work of a mobile and changing collective of researchers and practitioners invested in bringing the sonic, as a multi-sensorial, embodied and tacit method of knowledge to pedagogy. The aim is to establish and foster a “Sonic Pedagogy”:
Sonic pedagogy is a recently coined term and practice arising from collaborations and associations between sound studies, sound arts, diversity and educational studies among others. It combines discourses and practices on sound and sensation with pedagogy (Furlonge 2018, Gershon 2017, 2018, Voegelin 2018). Thus, it uses sound and listening to access embodied, tacit and plural knowledges, and to bring an inclusive approach to the learning and teaching process. It is a nascent field concerned with the impoverishment of listening in education (Gallagher et al. 2017). It aims to promote sound’s sensorial embodied and relational dimension (Kassabian 2013, Schulze 2018, 2020), to pluralise what can be taught, how it can be engaged in and by whom. This is not a pedagogy of how to listen or make sounds, as a virtuosity and particular skill; the promotion of good or bad listening (Schafer 1967, 1992), but a pedagogy from and with listening and sound making. It works with sound as a material intervention that troubles taxonomical scholarship and moves towards a multitude of affects and understandings (Page&Hickey-Moody 2015). It starts from the experience of sound as making pedagogy “sensational” (Springgay 2011): it helps communicate beyond the semantic, beyond the categories and taxonomies of the learnt and beyond the disenfranchising effect of endless data (Hawkins&Kanngieser 2017). Intead, it includes sensory, tacit, and embodied activities as an active part of learning, leading to plural ways of understanding and being involved (hooks 1994, 2003, 2010). As such it enables a “response-able pedagogy”, that is realized through “ethico-political practices which incorporate a relational ontology into teaching and learning activities and thus extend their transformative potential.” (Bozalek&Zembylas 2017, p64) into a plural, inclusive and applied practice. The aim is to enable “teaching (…) for all students, no matter what borders they need to cross” (Aikenhead 1996, p2). These are cultural, educational, gender, race and economic borders, which an embodied and participative knowing from sound can address and cross to generate a broad engagement.
The motivation and starting point for this endeavour was the AHRC funded project Listening Across Disciplines II. This was a research project that set out to systematically investigate the potential of listening as a legitimate and reliable methodology for research across the arts and humanities, science, social science and technology. In the course of working collaboratively and across various disciplines it became apparent that most disciplines lacked a sonic literacy, sound focused vocabularies and methodologies, as well as a basic awareness and sensibility towards the potentialities of a sonic knowledge and auditory meditation. In response, it seemed important to consider the place of sound making and listening in the teaching and learning approaches across disciplines. Recognising that the discounting and near exclusion of sound in different fields of research and work, while representing an assessment of the sonic as unreliable, unrepeatable and thus of low value in relation to knowledge and production, also revealed a direct link to the lack of an integrative sonic focus during the instructional and training period. Therefore, and aware that these questions were being raised by fellow theorists, pedagogues and practitioners, a new arm of the LxDII research developed around ‘sonic pedagogy’.
To begin to understand what could be included in and understood by the term sonic pedagogy, LxDII hosted a series of workshops with practitioners and theorists whose work shares an interest in the sonic and pedagogy to investigate it as an emerging field. The aim was firstly to explore together what sonic pedagogy is or can be: attempting to find its histories and contemporary points of contact, and to relate those to issues of identity, exclusions and erasures, and the possibility of a plural and inclusive teaching and learning. Secondly, we investigated how sonic pedagogy is practiced and what methods and approaches underpin it, including the consideration of digital learning, art-based interventions, participation and community. From there and lastly, we considered what entrainment, curriculum and educational framework sonic pedagogy might demand, exploring issues of documentation, communication, advocacy and engagement.
Three podcasts documenting these first “sonic pedagogy study days” can be listened to here.
These feature recordings from the workshops and were accompanied by the initiation of a Facebook working group.
This website hopes to further this discussion and research, and to establish Sonic Pedagogy as a widely practised, critical, embodied, and affective methodology across disciplines. It aims to show and document different projects by members of this mobile and changing collective of “Sonic Pedagogists”, to provide a growing resource for fellow researchers and practitioners, students and teachers, and to serve as a point of contact and community building.
Sonic Pedagogy 