What are we missing? voice and listening as an event

Abstract

The paper begins with the concept of voice and questions its different meanings, especially in educational settings, to propose a philosophical framing of people-of-young-age’s material voices. It then proposes to understand those voices as disruptive differences or opportunities to (re)think about our roles as educators and, most of all, to return to the question of what a philosophical approach to childhood might disrupt. In doing so, it outlines some ideas about “voice” as sound and materiality (Cavarero, 2005) and also about “listening” as a permanent attention to what might emerge (Nancy, 2002; Davies, 2014), to then extend particular meanings of these concepts to the practice of thinking philosophically with people of different ages in the community of philosophical inquiry educational setting (Kennedy & Kennedy, 2012). It also builds on the concept of “event” by Gilles Deleuze (Deleuze, 2013), as a potential immanent within a confluence of forces, to then ask how we can foster a philosophical way of living (in) education that takes people-of-young-age’s material voices as something we cannot afford to lose. Finally, the paper proposes to frame the community of philosophical inquiry as a philosophical community of voices, in the sense of an opportunity to experience the materiality of all the voices as something that matters in the shared thought of its participants.