to be listening: music and teaching in early childhood education

The essay brings together studies around the poetic dimension of language in order to address the relationship between teaching young children and the listening experience as an aesthetic manner of coexisting in the world. This approximation between philosophy, arts and early childhood education begins with the meeting between music and education, and assumes that what we listen to is the sound that meaning makes, and not the meaning of a sound as an object of interpretation. Our text is inspired by Jean-Luc Nancy, who affirms that the sonorous invokes the sensible, and does so in a constant movement that never finishes producing a meaning. As such, it resists the privilege of the optical model in western theory. Nancy's Being in Listening associates resonance with the sound that the senses make deep in the body. Music as an interplay between sound and noise, as a poetic production, and a resonant organization of sensibility, encourages infants and young children to play with the sonorities of the world, and to live the poetics of noise as a form of empowerment. Children's appetite for the sonorous signifies a hunger for the deeply felt experience--the aesthesia-- of listening to the world in the plurality of coexistence. The gesture of listening with babies and young children is an educational one, which points to the world-constitutive experience of the resonances and reverberations of meaning that inhabit the sonorous. In listening with children, we are imbricated in sound, and experience ourselves as sharing in a sensible, polyphonic ground of voices, signs, gestures, forms and sensibilities, which act to situate us as being-with each other in the world.