Quiet Noticing

“Our relationship with land cannot heal until we hear its stories.”

Robin Wall Kimmerer, Braiding Sweetgrass

How might we listen to the stories of the world? There are many ways. We might follow the movements of ants across the earth, listen to the night music when a bandicoot appears, feel the warmth of a gecko resting in the hand, notice a mulberry ripe for picking, or become suddenly aware of a downpour arriving upon the landscape.

Listening, in this sense, is not confined to sound. To listen is to notice, to become sensorially attentive and receptive to what the world presents. It is to come close enough to recognise that there is something there to which we might respond.

This kind of listening matters for education. Place-responsive scholarship has challenged approaches that understand environments merely as settings in which education occurs. Instead, it draws attention to the relationships through which people, places and more-than-human participants become involved in learning (Mannion, Fenwick, & Lynch, 2013; Mannion & Lynch, 2016; Lynch & Mannion, 2021). Place matters, environments participate in learning, and what educators and learners are able to notice and respond to matters too.

Perhaps this is where attunement becomes useful. Attunement asks something slightly different from simply knowing about an environment. It suggests becoming increasingly perceptive and responsive to the relations through which a place is continually becoming. But how might we cultivate this kind of attentiveness?

Making involves particular forms of listening. Materials are touched and encountered, movements observed, textures felt, weather experienced, places revisited, accidents noticed and unexpected encounters recognised. Importantly, the artist does more than notice. The artist responds through making, allowing what is encountered to redirect a gesture, alter a decision, invite another material, change a movement or transform what the work becomes. Making becomes a conversation of sorts, although not necessarily one conducted through words.

This offers an interesting possibility for education. What if attentiveness to the world is not simply something we teach by providing more information about it? What if it is also something that can be practised?

Drawing, collecting, photographing, walking, writing, painting, listening, touching and making might become ways of coming into closer relation with the places in which we live and learn. Not because art needs to communicate an environmental message, but because artistic practice can ask us to notice differently. It can shift our attention from simply being in nature towards considering what it might mean to learn with the world around us.

This proposition is beautifully modest. We do not necessarily need to begin by knowing what an encounter will teach us. We might begin simply by becoming attentive enough to notice what is already happening: an ant moving across the earth, a gecko resting in a warm hand, a mulberry becoming ripe, or the sudden arrival of rain.

Perhaps listening to the stories of the world begins with this kind of noticing, and with becoming curious about how we might respond.

Until next time,

Dr Mon x

References

Kimmerer, R. W. (2013). Braiding sweetgrass: Indigenous wisdom, scientific knowledge, and the teachings of plants. Milkweed Editions.

Lynch, J., & Mannion, G. (2021). Place-responsive pedagogies in the Anthropocene: Attuning with the more-than-human. Environmental Education Research, 27(6), 864–878.

Mannion, G., Fenwick, A., & Lynch, J. (2013). Place-responsive pedagogy: Learning from teachers’ experiences of excursions in nature. Environmental Education Research, 19(6), 792–809.

Mannion, G., & Lynch, J. (2016). The primacy of place in education in outdoor settings. In B. Humberstone, H. Prince, & K. A. Henderson (Eds.), Routledge international handbook of outdoor studies (pp. 85–94). Routledge.