Introduction
This report reflects on my intervention design for the Inclusive Practices unit: a recurring drop-in Listening Group for staff and students at UAL. Rooted in my positionality as a sound artist, educator, and PhD researcher, the intervention explores listening as a radical, inclusive, and justice-oriented practice.
As both a student and a teacher, I am acutely aware of how structures within higher education valorise quick thinking, articulate speech, and confident vocal participation. These expectations, often framed as neutral, I’ve observed to perpetuate exclusion—particularly for those with English as a second language, neurodivergent or shy/anxious students.
Drawing on Sara Ahmed’s concept of the ‘feminist ear’ (2022) and Brandon LaBelle’s acoustic justice (2021), my intervention seeks to value slow learning through listening—not as a passive act but as a generative, participatory one. My aim is to create a space where listening itself becomes a valid form of academic and social contribution, challenging hierarchies that privilege voice, confidence, and fluency over presence, participation and reflection.
Context
I teach across the BA and MA Sound Arts courses at LCC. These cohorts are highly international, linguistically diverse, and include a high percentage of neurodiverse students. Students frequently navigate layered identities, including disability, queerness, and racialised experience—contexts that make the question of who is heard and how they are heard particularly urgent.
The department has a history of prestigious and long-running extra-curricular activities, well-attended by staff and students, including a laptop orchestra and experimental choir. Both projects ended recently due to staff changes. The Listening Group is intended as a new extra-curricular intervention: open, accessible, and cross-hierarchical, welcoming both students and staff. The turn in sound studies towards naming listening modes, made evident in the recent Listening Together symposium (LCC, 2025) also points towards this subject being timely.
Listening Group sessions will follow a simple structure: each begins with a shared listening score (inspired by Pauline Oliveros’ Deep Listening practice), practiced together followed by reflective activities with options for sonic, graphic or gestural responses. The invitation is not just to attend to what we listen to, but how we listen, surfacing dynamics of voice, power, silence, and positionality. Participation does not require speaking—silent presence is valued.
As a PhD researcher as well as an associate lecturer, I have access to support in the department, small amounts of funding, and a supportive peer network of other postgrad students to help sustain the intervention.
Inclusive Learning
My intervention is shaped by several interrelated theories of inclusive practice, with a focus on intersectionality, epistemic justice, and aural diversity.
In The Importance and Difficulties of Listening Skill (Gultom, Utari, & Rahmawati, 2023), listening is framed as a skill to be acquired. This aligns with dominant pedagogic narratives that treat activities as measurable, perfectible, and neutral. However, this view assumes an ‘ideal listener’ despite the reality that listening is always situated, shaped by identity, culture, and embodied experience. In contrast, Drever and Hugill’s Aural Diversity (2022) reframes listening as plural and ever-changing, while for Lipari, in her seminar Listening, Thinking, Being (2014) listening is relational.
Harris, in Embracing the Silence (2022), critiques pedagogies that prioritise orality and speed. Her analysis of introverted learners in online classrooms resonated with my own frustrations, particularly in co-teaching situations with 60 students to a classroom, where students are expected to articulate on the spot in front of peers—when quiet reflection might be more pedagogically valuable to them and those with additional needs are least likely to benefit. Harris cites Dana Weeks (2018): ‘Listening without anticipating and articulating an immediate response provides space for understanding ideas, perspectives, and experiences that may differ from one’s own’. This idea is at the heart of my intervention.
Listening here is not treated as a skill to master, but as a practice to cultivate, one that acknowledges epistemic injustice (Rekis, 2023) in who is seen as a ‘knower’ and how knowledge is conveyed. As I reflected in the session design, listening is not just auditory, but embodied, affective, and shaped by access needs, sensory processing, and cultural orientation. The intervention assumes no ‘normal’ listener.
While Freire is frequently cited in HE pedagogy, his pedagogical model where facilitators listen deeply before engaging communities (Freire, 1970) is rarely embedded. Within this intervention, I begin by positioning myself as facilitator—but not expert. I hope to become a co-learner in the sessions, creating opportunities for group members to take on facilitation roles. My project seeks to offer a quiet, persistent intervention at the margins—low-barrier and slow-burning, valuing listening practice with faith in its ability to create cultural shifts over time.
Reflection
The listening group emerged from my frustration with facilitating seminars within conditions which appeared to discourage students from speaking – such as large class sizes, poor classroom acoustics and looming assessments. I noticed that focus on speaking exacerbated divides between native-English-speaking and international students. Further, I see increasing numbers of students disengage from class discussion, looking at phones rather than listening. I want to show the value of listening and encourage this as a practice.
My tutor offered valuable feedback on the intervention, challenging me to consider the potential outcomes from the group. What might feasibly result from this intervention? This encouraged me to think not just in the short term, of classroom dynamics, but also about the potential for new understandings between students and staff, and a slow shift where listening is a signal of care, respect and curiosity – traits I believe to be just as valuable as artistic skill. Victor also asked about my workload, which made me consider how the project could last beyond my own involvement – could students eventually facilitate it? He also encouraged me to consider how learning could be evidenced. Though at first this seemed counter to my proposal for a group that does not focus on outcomes, I can see the value in documenting aspects of the group work, perhaps through a Padlet or shared archive—to gather reflections and build a traceable impact.
Peer feedback from my group was affirming and helped me think beyond the immediate plan. Romany emphasised the need for accessible materials—such as visual prompts and translated scores—for sensory or linguistic inclusion. Ellie proposed a train-the-trainer model where students could co-lead, promoting peer-to-peer learning. Christin raised insightful questions about the hierarchy of the senses, encouraging me to think about how sonic canons themselves carry cultural biases. Danny prompted me to consider whether listening might include music, environmental sound, or personal sound archives, making space for culturally plural practices of attention.
One risk I identified was the ambiguity of the sessions. Without a clear goal, would participants be confused or disengaged? Would it be misunderstood as therapy or mindfulness? To mitigate this, I will make sure to frame the practice clearly as artistic and critical, not therapeutic. Each session includes a short framing, referencing thinkers like Oliveros or Ahmed, before the listening begins. This establishes critical intent.
Another challenge is institutional sustainability. As an associate lecturer, my time is fragmented. Running something extra-curricular, unpaid, and informal requires commitment—but it also allows autonomy. Embedding the work into my PhD (practice-based) gives it longevity and makes it research-informed.
A third risk is in addressing the power I hold or represent, to allow for a space free from hierarchy. As a white tutor in a powerful institution, I represent not only institutional authority but also dominant cultural norms around voice, legitimacy, and knowledge. Even with intentions toward equity, my presence may inadvertently shape how participants behave—who feels safe, who speaks, who listens. It is important that I remain reflexive about my positionality, and that I actively work to redistribute authority. This could mean co-facilitation with students, inviting others to lead listening scores, or establishing mechanisms for shared authorship and reflection. Without these steps, the intervention risks reinforcing the very hierarchies it seeks to unsettle.
In terms of institutional alignment, my intervention sits in dialogue with Advance HE’s guidance on inclusive practice and with UAL’s online learning framework which calls for valuing diverse forms of student contributions. However, it also critiques the gap between institutional rhetoric and lived experience—especially around neurodiversity and linguistic access. My aim is to gently highlight that gap and provide one small bridge.
Action
I propose that the Listening Group run once a month, with sessions begin within the department and venture outside – if the listening scores call for this, with the added value of reducing institutional ‘feel’ and increasing the groups visibility. I hope to eventually develop an online repository where participants can contribute reflections, listening scores, or alternative responses—supporting epistemic pluralism.
Evaluation
To evaluate the impact, I will:
- Reflect on attendance and participation patterns
- Look for signs of peer facilitation or adaptation (e.g., students contributing scores)
- Integrate qualitative reflections into my doctoral research
Evaluation will not be metric-driven, but oriented toward participation and process. For instance: Are participants finding new value in listening? Are they recognising power in silence? Are staff and students engaging in new ways?
Conclusion
As someone who has often felt ambivalent about the demand to speak, I see listening not as retreat but as radical attention. My role as an educator is not only to provide knowledge but to create the conditions for others’ knowledge—and presence—to be received.
The Listening Group allows me to live out values I claim to hold: intersectional justice, mutual learning, and sensory inclusion. It is not a fix but a practice of ongoing invitation—to listen differently, to listen more, and to reflect on who is heard.
In a moment when higher education feels increasingly performative and instrumentalised, I propose listening as both resistance and care.
Bibliography
Advance HE (2023) Framework for Enhancing Student Success in Higher Education Available at: https://advance-he.ac.uk/knowledge-hub/framework-enhancing-student-success-higher-education Accessed (21/06/2025)
Ahmed, S. (2022) Feminist Ears [blog post]. Available at: https://feministkilljoys.com/2022/06/01/feminist-ears/ (Accessed: 23/07/2025)
Carlyle, A. & Lane, C. eds. (2013) On Listening. London: Uniformbooks.
Drever, J. L. & Hugill, A. eds. (2022) Aural Diversity. New York: Routledge.
Freire, P. (1970) Pedagogy of the Oppressed. New York: Herder and Herder.
Gultom, Q., Utari, P. & Rahmawati, W. (2023). ‘The Importance and Difficulties of Listening Skill: A Description’. EXCELLENCE: Journal of English and English Education, 3, pp. 28–31. DOI: 10.47662/ejeee.v3i1.584.
Harris, J. (2022) Embracing the Silence: Introverted Learning and the Online Classroom. London: UCL Press.
LaBelle, B. (2018) Sonic Agency: Sound and Emergent Forms of Resistance. London: Goldsmiths Press.
Lipari, L. (2014) Listening, Thinking, Being: Toward an Ethics of Attunement. Penn State Press.
Rekis, J. (2023) ‘Religious Identity and Epistemic Injustice: An Intersectional Account’. Hypatia. Available at: https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/hypatia/article/religious-identity-and-epistemic-injustice-an-intersectional-account/58E22487A151EC6C547B681189AF9BB4 (Accessed: 5th June 2025).
UAL (2022) Online learning framework. Available at: https://sebastianmay.myblog.arts.ac.uk/files/2023/03/ual-online-learning-framework-short.pdf Accessed (21/06/2025)Weeks, D. (2018) ‘The Value of Silence in Schools’. Independent School Magazine.