to be listening: music and teaching in early childhood education

Abstract

This paper brings studies around the poetic dimension of language to approach the relationship between teaching in preschool education and the experience of being open and listening as an aesthesic way of coexisting in the world. The approximation of philosophy, arts and preschool education from the reunion between music and education highlights that listening refers to the sound of meaning, and not to the meaning of the sound to be interpreted. The dialog with the thinking of Jean-Luc Nancy, stating that the sensible sense/meaning arouses the intelligible sense/meaning and in a constant movement that is not completed or finalized, producing signification or information, appears as a philosophical resistance to the privilege of the theoretical record founded upon the western prevalence of the optical model. To be open and listening implies the resonance as the sound of sense, as the body's first or last depth. The music as a play between sound and noise, as a poetic production of ordering sound senses provoked by resonance – as a gesture of listening to the listening, contributes to question the education of babies and small children based on a body that can play with the worlds' sounds to experience the poetics of making noise as the musical power of playing with sounds and noises. Children's sonic appetite calls them to make noise for the esthesia of listening to the world in the plurality of coexistence. The gesture of being open and listening in the teaching of babies and small children points out to educative actions that consider the experience constituted by resonances and reverberations of meanings implied in the sound, a feeling of feeling (aisthesis), as share and sharing of voices, signs, gestures, shapes, of the felt meaning and the sensible meaning that gather ones-with-others in human coexistence.