Creative listening as caring for fragile beginnings: a collaborative conceptual study

Listening arguably holds a more expansive and generative role in educational dialogue than it is currently afforded in schools. The current study seeks to advance such a conceptual understanding of teachers’ listening with the help of ten teachers, representing a range of professional backgrounds, engaged in iterative cycles of experimentation, reflection, and interviews. Grounded in Dewey’s pragmatism, this collaborative conceptual inquiry treats teachers as co-theorists, democratising knowledge production and facilitating navigation of ethical, epistemic, and relational dimensions of teaching. The analyses show that teachers’ contextually grounded insights enrich existing conceptions of creative listening by foregrounding a caring for fragile beginnings: listening for students’ tentative and hesitant attempts to articulate personal entry points into the subject and attending to the potential embedded in these fragile beginnings within a Deweyan conception of creative democracy. Teachers’ listening, in this sense, becomes a practice of creative care: it challenges students to contribute their own emerging insights while nurturing those contributions with warmth and gentleness. As a result, creative listening becomes not only a pedagogical strategy but also an ethical practice—one that transforms the fragility of open-ended explorations into opportunities for growth and supports inclusive, co-creative, and democratic engagement with subject matter.