Towards an Auditory Pedagogy

My frequent partner in crime Pekka Ihanainen and I wrote a short piece on the need for an auditory pedagogy, one that extends beyond the dialogue inherent to many socialized pedagogies. We believe in dialogue as well, of course, but value the staccato rhythms, slowness, and stillness that digital technologies provide, particularly at such distance (geographically). From Seoul to Jyväskylä, Pekka and I have been trading short recordings on emergent topics. The citation is here as is the link to the article itself.

• Gallagher, M. & Ihanainen, P. (2016). Towards an Auditory Pedagogy. SeOppi, The Association of the Finnish eLearning Centre.

Need

Rapid movement and change challenges human interactions and environments, but it also makes experiential evolutionary resistance. We learn through repeated interactions with our lived environments, methodically building capacity and resilience in the face of motion and change. As with many processes in nature, learning takes time, yet it is this perceived slowness that becomes the pejorative in education with allusions to a lack of intelligence or capacity.

There is a need to reclaim the aspects of pedagogy that have been backgrounded in the era of foregrounded educational automation, standardized assessments, and granular learning objectives, where progress is measured in quantitative increments and minutiae. We look to interject aspects of stillness, silence, and (relative) slowness into our pedagogies, to build upon the pedagogy of composure (Noble & Watkins, 2009), the embodied pedagogy (Irwin, 1999), slow learning movements, and to a lesser extent the pedagogy of the psyche (Athanasou, 2003). Ultimately, pedagogy needs elements of slowness, stillness, and patience embedded into its structure to balance the foregrounded elements of immediacy, urgency, and a trend towards the avoidance of abstraction in societies accustomed to regimes of efficiency, accountability, and performance. In this short work, we demonstrate how this can be done with one particular mode, a mode prone to measurable and assessable elusiveness: audio.