Hospicing Hope in Education: Swansongs, Sustainability, and a Pedagogical Ethic of Listening

What are the sounds of hope in education today? Children play, laugh, tease each other, or cry. School buses rumble, bells ring, and teachers project their voices over the chatter of the youthful burgeoning of sound. Schools observe the day, the seasons and the years, quietly humming ‘This too shall pass’ to any interruption from the educational agenda. Through the sounds of hope, we hear how schools rearticulate patterns that structure their untenable existence. We identify these patterns as the most pressing crisis in education. The ardent commitment to upholding the static structures that reify human exceptionalism (i.e. white, male, cisgender) within our current ecological and social traumas has become unsustainable. We provoke these structures, recognizing that education sings its swansong. This chapter imports sound thinking and sonic ontologies into education to reconceptualize the role of hope within education. Rather than attempt to breathe life into a system in crisis, we turn to listening-as-witnessing as a pedagogical ethic for uncertain times. This pedagogical ethic requires a radical commitment to listening to the structures of intersubjective humanist performativity that pervade education. Listening recognizes that our habitual structures of perception are not easily understood and that they are even less easily unlearned. Educational hope is one of these structures, yearning for transformation through its swansong, but lamenting its inability to sustain the discovery of that transformational end. Our chapter offers a theoretical soundscape for listening to educational futures and hope differently—a soundscape that is transformative and full of potential.