Intervention: Listening Practice for Inclusive Pedagogies
This intervention offers a recurring drop-in listening workshop for students and staff, inspired by composer and feminist thinker Pauline Oliveros’ proposal to ‘listen to our listening’. Each session provides a space for participants to trial a listening score. Structured reflections follow, where participants discuss not only what they listened to but also how they listened, surfacing dynamics of privilege, voice, and presence.
Diversity considerations:
The intervention foregrounds neurodiversity, linguistic diversity, and cultural difference—dimensions that often shape who is ‘heard’ in the classroom. By focusing on listening over speaking, the practice supports participation from students who may be less comfortable with dominant discussion formats, including those for whom English is an additional language or who experience anxiety or sensory sensitivities. Listening is reframed as a productive contribution, rather than a passive state.
Link to practice:
As a community artist, my work has long been concerned with group dynamics. My doctoral research explores listening within community-based art making, and I now wish to transpose this learning into a pedagogic setting—asking how listening can reveal hidden structures, whether relational or political. By centering listening as method, this intervention directly challenges hierarchies of voice in the classroom.
Feasibility:
The intervention is feasible as it requires minimal resources (a space, simple stationary) and can be offered as an extracurricular resource. One challenge lies in shifting pedagogical norms—valuing silence, slowness, and deep attention. However, this approach aligns with wider shifts in higher education towards inclusive practice and active learning. Recruitment of participants may also be a challenge; I plan to begin by offering the workshops to students in sound and music departments, where listening is already a topic of concern, with the hope that students will value the sessions and invite others to join.
Peers’ feedback:
I have not yet had the opportunity to propose this to the course team.
Hannah, I appreciate how this intervention challenges dominant norms around participation, often centred on verbal expression, by validating quieter, more reflective modes of engagement. Your focus on neurodiversity, linguistic difference and cultural variation is crucial in classrooms where traditional formats can exclude. Reframing listening as active contribution invites a richer understanding of presence and power.
The plan to begin with sound and music students is a good idea, grounding the work in relevant contexts and supporting organic growth. One suggestion is to consider how listening scores and reflections might be adapted for diverse sensory and cognitive needs, through visual prompts or translated materials, to increase accessibility and confidence for all participants.
This has real potential to shift how we understand voice, participation, and learning, it’s well-considered and a feasible intervention that aligns with inclusive pedagogies.
This sounds like a really interesting and exciting intervention. I really like how you are taking the form of listening and making it not only a valid form of contribution but a active need in these sessions. There is also scope for this to become a student lead practice where you could also train students to become facilitators of sessions which could help promote peer to peer learning. Looking forward to seeing how this develops
This was such an interesting proposal that made me think about the hierarchy of senses, amongst other things. I appreciated your phrase ‘English as an additional language’, I have never heard that term, but it certainly places less emphasis the non-dominance, or a hierarchy of linguistic knowing, so thanks for sharing that. Secondly, what an illuminating provocation to think about how we actively receive as learners rather than how we express ourselves. It certainly seems like our educational systems gear us up to be great orators or also to perhaps privilege those who are. Is listening strictly auditory in this case? What would be the ‘listening score’?