Listening to Learning
Listening to Learning
Research Project & Audio Documentary
By Mark Peter Wright
Leverhulme Trust Artist in Residence
Manchester Metropolitan University (MMU)
2017/18
Listening to Learning is audio documentary produced as part of a Leverhulme Trust Artist in Residence award based at Manchester Metropolitan University (MMU), 2017/18. The project was developed in collaboration Dr. Michael Gallagher in the Education and Social Research Institute (ESRI). Wright conducted interviews with education and geography practitioners, teachers and researchers in the Faculty of Education about the role of listening in their work; how they listen and what they are listening for within their pedagogical processes and methods. Voices are layered and mixed with ambient and electromagnetic fields from the architecture of the research center itself – linking the space in which listening takes place as part of an ecology of relations and praxis. The work was premiered in Jan 2018 in MMU.
As part of the residency Wright and Gallagher also collaborated with Dr. David Rousell at the Biosocial Research Lab (MMU) where they developed the project: Becoming Listening Bodies. The research explored how listening walks affect bodies, and how the method of walking can function as a multi-sensory pedagogy with children. Listening walks were recorded using a variety of wearable biosensors, body mounted video cameras, photographs and audio, producing a rich set of “sensational” research data. This data was shared with participants as part of a dialogical process with responses gathered through various creative methods including projections, mapping, drawing and collage. Becoming Listening Bodies: Soundwalking as a Pedagogy of Sensation was presented at the 5th Conference on Arts Based Research & Artistic Research Provoking Research and Social Intervention, 13 -15 March 2018, TATE Liverpool.
