Aesthetics and Ethics of Listening

• In Event: Roundtable Session 57
  In Roundtable Session: Listening to Student Voices

Abstract

Abstract
      This paper examines listening as ethical and aesthetic engagement. It considers the implications, dimensions and ramifications of relational listening both within pedagogical practice and in a philosophical sense. Listening in the context of this paper is understood as a form of attunement that is multisensory, subjective, and open to meaning and connection.

A culture of listening to children has social and philosophical dimensions beyond education because listening involves a release of power and certainty. To still oneself sufficiently to truly listen requires humility, interest and grace, and an assumption of not knowing. I explore the possibility that listening is intrinsically an aesthetic and ethical act by examining the work of a number of philosophers and theorists in both education and aesthetics and ethics.

Author

• Kerri Nicole Embrey, York University