This panel proposes creative listening as an under-theorized practice at the intersection of art, education, and democratic life. Dewey’s theory of listening has previously been situated within his account of communication and democratic social life (Garrison, 1996; Waks, 2011). The proposed panel. drawing primarily on Dewey’s accounts of art as experience, educative growth, and creative democracy (Dewey 1922, 1925; 1934; 1938, 1939) - breaks new ground by exploring listening as an active, embodied, creative and imaginative mode of experience through which meaning is generated, habits are reconstructed, and life is renewed.

The panel, consisting of five brief presentations, speaks directly to the conference theme Borders and Bridges by addressing three interconnected crossings. First, it explores the temporal bridge between past and future, showing how creative listening allows inherited traditions to be received not through imitation or conformity, but through renewal—what Dewey described as the introduction of new meanings into present experience: “new every morning, fresh every evening” (Dewey, 1922, MW14:147). Second, it bridges the often-policed boundary between the fine arts and the art of living, arguing—following Dewey—that aesthetic experience and artistic intelligence are continuous with everyday practices of work, learning, and dialogue (Dewey 1934, LW: 10: 13). Third, it crosses cultural and philosophical borders, bringing Dewey into conversation with jazz traditions, contemporary educational theory, generative AI, and Daoist philosophy, especially Zhuangzi’s account of listening as a mode of world-disclosure and self-cultivation (Behuniak, 2019; Yang, 2021). Across these contexts, creative listening is understood as a formative practice that sustains democratic life as a way of living together. Dewey argued that democracy depends not only on institutions but on the quality of shared experience, continuously renewed through communication (Dewey 1939, LW14). Creative listening plays a key role in democratic renewal, enabling individuals and communities to remain responsive to difference, resistance, and new possibilities rather than retreating into mere recognition, repetition, or self-confirmation.

The panel also speaks directly to the sub-theme The Arts, Education, and Social Change. It shows how the arts—broadly construed—model forms of attention that integrate cognitive, affective, and practice-based dimensions of experience. Jazz improvisation, classroom dialogue, teacher imagination, and Daoist practices of listening all reveal how creativity depends on disciplined receptivity, ethical regard for others, and openness to what exceeds prior frameworks (Behuniak, J.,2019). These practices challenge reductive models of education focused on transmission, optimization, or personalization, and they raise critical questions about current technological imaginaries, especially those surrounding generative AI.

Taken together, presenters from the US, UK, Europe, and China argue that creative listening is not ancillary to education or democracy, but constitutive of both. In an age marked by acceleration, automation, and fragmentation of attention, the cultivation of creative listening emerges as an urgent educational and civic task—one that bridges traditions and innovations, arts and everyday life, and diverse cultural philosophies of human flourishing.

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.

Drawing on John Dewey’s vision of growth as an open-ended process that is continually staring anew, this paper examines how student-initiated inquiries can enhance engagement and understanding by navigating the dynamic interplay between listening for the expected and listening for the unexpected. It is suggested that students listening for the expected temporarily halts exploration, providing an opportunity to consolidate understanding and create stable foundations for further explorations into the unknown. In contrast, students listening for the unexpected can expand the subject matter into new contexts, allowing topics to resurface in unforeseen ways. This form of listening is taken to encourage dialogue to venture beyond established boundaries, sparking novel connections and serendipitous insights. These two forms of listening are mutually reinforcing: Listening for the expected requires a willingness to engage with the unknown, allowing students to collaborate with others in a dialogue to test and refine their comprehension of the subject matter. Conversely, listening for the unexpected requires a grounding in the expected, serving as a reference point for assessing how far off the beaten path exploration can diverge. Although the tension between the two forms of listening can sometimes lead to uncreative outcomes, this tension is also integral to fostering students’ growth and anaesthetic sense of connection to subject matter.

Historical knowledge, along with knowledge acquired in other subjects, is crucial for individuals to make sense of and engage with the world around them. Evidence suggests that educational systems fail to adequately support disadvantaged groups in accessing the knowledge conveyed through education. This article presents a study comparing the historical knowledge of students attending lower-secondary schools in varying socio-economic environments. Using regression analysis and concept analysis, we examine responses (n=100) to both selected-and constructed-response items from the Swedish national test in history. The sampled items address factual, conceptual, and procedural knowledge types, and the results indicate consistent differences between students from low SES and high SES schools across all types of knowledge. Findings also show that socio-economic status has a larger explanatory value than gender or mother tongue. The differences regarding historical knowledge are discussed in relation to Biesta’s three dimensions of education, providing a philosophical perspective on the broader implications of these disparities in educational success.

Listening is a familiar activity in education but has received less interest in the literature than speaking, matching its position in our popular culture, which focuses on freedom of speech and extrovert demeanor. Drawing on John Dewey to understand what characterizes creative listening in educational dialogue, this paper argues that creative listening initiates and prolongs explorations into a subject matter through creative tensions, here described as the interplay between originality and meaningfulness that triggers further inquiries and gives rise to ambivalent experiences within the teacher. Through these tensions, creative listening widens the subject matter and increases the opportunities for teachers and students to connect to the world of the subject matter. To achieve this form of listening, the teacher must artfully navigate the tangle of creative endeavors to facilitate enriched educational experiences for the students. By highlighting creative listening as a subtle but powerful force in educational dialogues, this paper strives to emphasize and expand the role of listening in education, promoting an understanding of the way silent communications aid complex forms of knowing.

Vid Malmö universitet finns forskningsgruppen Didaktiska studier (DS), vars profil präglas av en flerstämmig didaktik. Denna flerstämmiga didaktik kommer till uttryck på olika sätt, bland annat genom att gruppen inkluderar didaktisk forskning inom olika områden såsom allmän didaktik, innehållsfokuserad didaktik/ämnesdidaktik (t.ex. musik-, matematik-, och språk-litteraturdidaktik), specialpedagogisk didaktik i förskola, cirkusdidaktik, fritidshemsdidaktik och didaktik i samverkan. Syftet är att belysa och bidra med kunskap om hur olika sätt att närma sig och använda teori inom empirisk forskning kan relateras till flerstämmig didaktik. Vi belyser detta genom att sätta olika didaktiska studier i relation till varandra – för att analysera likheter och skillnader i hur teori används, vilket kan hänföras till komparativ didaktik. I de didaktiska studierna används abduktiv ansats återkommande som analytisk strategi och metodologisk bestämning. Utifrån denna analys för vi en kritisk diskussion kring teoriers roll, hur den både kan berika och fördjupa förståelse av komplexa undervisnings­verkligheter, men hur teori också kan begränsa och styra forskning i olika riktningar. Vi relaterar särskilt till didaktiska nivåer, vilka inkluderar aktionsnivå, teoretisk nivå och metateoretisk nivå rörande ontologi, epistemologi och metodologi. Resultatet utfaller i en flerstämmighet på samtliga nivåer – med andra ord leder det prövande närmandet till teoriers flersidiga funktion i flerstämmig didaktik.