Kimberly Post is an Assistant Professor and Program Director at Saint Joseph's College of Maine, where she teaches and co-leads the Center for Sustainable Communities. Her research focuses on high impact practices in education, including community-based research, sustainability education, reflective practices, and compassion development. Kimberly is author of A Settled Mind, 2007's groundbreaking curriculum guide for mindfulness and reflection in the classroom. Her most recent peer-reviewed publication, Protecting Little Sebago: A Model College-Lake Association Sustainable Partnership, can be found in the April 2022 issue of Sustainability and Climate Change.
Kimberly Post is an Assistant Professor and Program Director at Saint Joseph's College of Maine, where she teaches and co-leads the Center for Sustainable Communities. Her research focuses on high impact practices in education, including community-based research, sustainability education, reflective practices, and compassion development. Kimberly is author of A Settled Mind, 2007's groundbreaking curriculum guide for mindfulness and reflection in the classroom. Her most recent peer-reviewed publication, Protecting Little Sebago: A Model College-Lake Association Sustainable Partnership, can be found in the April 2022 issue of Sustainability and Climate Change.
Resources provided by Kimberly:
Freire, P. (1972).Pedagogy of the oppressed. Penguin.
Freire, P. (1995).Pedagogy of hope: Reliving pedagogy of the oppressed.Continuum.
Freire, P. (1997).Pedagogy of the heart. Continuum.
Haskell, D. G. (2022).Sounds wild and broken. Penguin.
Haskell, D. G. (2019).The voices of birds and the language of belonging.Emergence Magazine. https://emergencemagazine.org/essay/the-voices-of-birds-and-the-language-of-belonging
Kimmerer, R. W. (2013).Braiding sweetgrass. Tantor Media, Inc.
MacGregor, J., Parks, S. (2009).Themes from the meeting, ‘Exploring sustainability and contemplative practice.’ Whidbey Institute, January 2009. Washington Center for Improving the Quality of Undergraduate Education. Evergreen College.
Whitehouse, A. (2015). Listening to birds in the anthropocene: The anxious semiotics of sound in a human-dominated world.Environmental Humanities. 6(1): 53–71. DOI:https://doi.org/10.1215/22011919-3615898
Intro/Outro Music:
Half Moon Island
https://halfmoonisland.bandcamp.com/
Jeff 00:05
Welcome to the interdisciplinary investigations podcast. I'm your host Jeffrey Perrin, and we're recording from the WS CA podcast lab in Portsmouth, New Hampshire. In our first season of this podcast, we're going to be focusing on the subjective and phenomenological experience of listening. The foundation of our investigation focuses on making sense of the world through the sounds, and lack of sounds that we encounter in our daily interactions. How do we hear these sounds? And how do we create meaning from the sounds? How does listening help us understand the world and our place in it? So during this inaugural season, we're joined by educators, artists, musicians, scientists, contemplative practitioners, scholars and activists, who track the importance of careful and engaged listening in a world that seems to enable scattered attention, disengagement and displacement. So their insights reveal great lessons in the stories of sound. And today, we're joined by Kimberly Post, who is an assistant professor and program director at St. Joseph's College of Maine, where she teaches and co leads the centers for sustainable communities. And her research focuses on high impact practices and education, including community based research, sustainability education, reflective practices and compassion development. Kimberly is the author of a settled mind 2007 groundbreaking curriculum guide for the mindfulness and reflection in the classroom. Her most recent peer reviewed publication predicting little Sebago a model college Lake Association sustainable partnership can be found in April 2022 issue of sustainability and climate change. Kimberly, welcome.
Kimberly 01:57
Hi, Jeff. Welcome. Thank you.
Jeff 02:00
So let's start off, I want to hear a little bit more about your professional background. And then we'll dive into this topic of of deep listening. But first, tell us a little bit about your professional background in this area.
Kimberly 02:16
Well, I started paying attention when I was working on my graduate degree at Lesley University in the early 2000s. And I was researching mindfulness, particularly mindfulness and education. And it's been a journey ever since I've discovered the power of mindfulness practice, both in teaching and and learning. And I've also learned that something that I call deep listening is a very powerful component of that. So I've been diving deep ever since.
Jeff 02:57
So yeah, why, why deep listening? Where, where specifically did your interest in this idea of deep listening come from?
Kimberly 03:06
Well, first, I should say that I believe it was composer, Pauline Oliveros, who coined the term deep listening in 1989. With her with the release of her album of the same name. And this album, if you ever have a chance to listen to it, I highly recommend it. It was recorded in a massive underground cistern in Washington State. It has a 45 second reverberation time and the musicians played within it. So you can imagine that each musician had to both play but also listen intently to each other and react not only to each other, but to all the the reverberation all the sounds around them. And Oliveros has often said that deep listening was actually radical attentiveness. And that's what I really think of this practice. And it seems to me that this kind of radical attentiveness this this deep listening is a way that is the way that we as human beings need to be able to listen to each other, in order to both heal and reorient ourselves, to our relationships and to our relationship with the Earth as well.
Jeff 04:17
And this practice of deep listening, what have you learned, personally, and how does this How does this show up? And how does this manifest personally for you in your life?
Kimberly 04:31
Well, I think I'd like to backtrack a little bit to when I was growing up. My introduction to this to really thinking about listening happened when I was a child. I was raised in close relationship to the natural world. And my parents were always naming the sounds that we heard around us, particularly birdsong. Both my parents are and we're we're in our birders. So I've been tuning my ears to it my entire life. My family tends to mark the changing of the seasons with bird songs. The first spring chatter of goldfinches, and robins. I live in Maine. So that first spring Chatter is very important. Summers loon calls the steadfast repetition of the Whopper Wilke song, autumns, barred owls and the Black Cap chick chickadees. that keep us company in the fall and winter. I think birds really sharpened my ability to pay attention to listen deeply, and to really value the capability that I've developed over time to listen. So I carried that with me, when I first actually I started, when I first started college, I started as a music student. And one of my professors told me something that has really stuck with me. She said that it wasn't the notes that mattered. It was the space around the notes. And I think about that a lot. And I tried to pay attention to the quiet space around notes around words around sounds, that spaces. To me it's like permission to take a breath, to lean into the silence. And to just be
Jeff 06:20
Yeah, that's such an important practice. And as someone who's also a deep admirer of nature, I'm often caught by the attention of of birds. The Black Capped Chickadee is definitely one of my favorites. And so, transitioning a little bit into your, both your graduate work and your research and your professional life. What have you learned here about this idea of deep listening that you can share with us?
Kimberly 06:51
Well, as you mentioned, I have a background in reflective practices, particularly in sustainability education. And I've spent the last year and a half researching connection. Specifically, how can we teach connection in the classroom. And I realized, the reason why I have such a deep and profound connection to the natural world is because I've been listening deeply to the natural world with with radical attentiveness. professor and author David Takus, wrote, We live much of our lives in our own heads in a reconfirming dialogue with ourselves. And this definitely gives me pause. What if our dialogues were exercises in deep listening rather than that continuous dialogue with ourselves? Because when we listen, we're being in relationship, whether it's listening in nature, or listening in conversation, we are never alone. It's dyadic, it's connective, we are paying attention and we're being present.
Jeff 08:04
And that presence seems to be such an important part of learning, right? If we can't actually pay attention and focus, and listen, then how do we really engage in that process of learning? And one of the things that I'm curious about is how we sort of facilitate that process of deep listening. But I'm curious as to what you're curious about, in regards to deep listening, what is it that you haven't yet figured out? Or haven't found answers to around and about the practice of deep listening?
Kimberly 08:41
I'm such a natural educator, that everything I do is always this quest to try to figure out how to then teach it to other people. And I just recently came across something called free listening. Have you heard of it? I haven't heard a free listing. Now. It's an activist movement. That was I believe it was founded in Los Angeles by somebody named Benjamin Mathis. And now I've learned that it's now internationally organized under the name urban confessional. So free listening is was was developed as a response to the idea that more and more people are feeling lonely and disconnected. And the method is pretty straightforward. And they have a few tenets that they follow. There's the 80/20 rule where you listen, when you're in in dialogue with somebody you listen for 80% of the time and only speak for 20% and only to ask questions and move things forward. And also removing the barriers to listening like your earbuds, your phones, any other distractions, and respecting silence as well. Listeners are encouraged to let that silence linger. And rather than filling the moments that we tend to want to fill those awkward silences. The idea is this might lead to more more deeper, more meaningful dialogue. And I think we can use listening as a way to heal disconnection this way. Because when you when you're leaning into those spaces, when you're leaning into the silence, you're allowing the space for more dialogue to happen, more connection to happen, more opportunities to be heard.
Jeff 10:22
You know, I think about this a lot, as an introvert, I feel like when I try to facilitate moments of silence, the world seems to fill up that silence very quickly, whether it's in conversation with someone, or whether it's just from the multitude of stimuli that are constantly coming at me. What, how do we do this? How do we facilitate how do we put mechanisms in place either internally, or from a societal standpoint? If this is so valuable, and it's so connected to how we learn and how we're in relationship with one another? What are the practices that that I can start to implement in my life that could could help move this forward?
Kimberly 11:08
Well, that's a really good question. Thanks, Jeff, for asking. I think that's kind of the ongoing practice of listening. It was Freire, who said that? A practice is made up of two components. It's the reflection and the action. So I think that that reflective piece in the case of your question is really important. Really paying attention to that silence that space between our words, and and feeling it and noticing it, and letting it just be there without having to feel the need to fill that space with some mindless chatter. I think that I think the birds can teach us a lot about that, too. If you listen to, if you go out in nature, and you listen to the birds singing, they're not just filling every moment with their song. They're they're trills rise and fall, and then their space, and then maybe somebody responds with their own rise and fall song. And, and I think birds understand the power of the space between the notes, and I think that we can learn from them just by listening.
Jeff 12:32
Yeah, that reminds me of some of Bernie Krause his work where he talks about the niche, and the fact that in in ecosystems, that all animals are in relationship to one another, and their sounds are actually in relationship to one another, sort of counter to this idea that we think about in terms of competition, but actually, all these species are working in collaboration with one another to facilitate healthy ecosystems in which they can all thrive. So where do you see you are a doctoral student? You are a professor, you are director of the Center for Sustainable Communities? Where do you see your work moving forward, and how does deep listening take a place in what you see in the in the trajectory of where you want to go?
Kimberly 13:19
First, considering the real nuts and bolts of it. I'm in the classroom with students, young people, traditional students, ages 18 through 22. And for the most part, they're distracted. They're challenged by their distractions. They're also probably still feeling the repercussions of the pandemic, that disconnection that loneliness. So, I think that bringing simple exercises into the classroom and any course, just to foster comfortableness with true listening is a good place to start. I do an exercise with students, it takes five minutes or less, and I break them up into pairs. And one takes notes and the other closes their eyes. And then we're all very quiet. And the person with their eyes close listens. And every time they hear a sound, they speak the sound and the person taking notes writes it down. And they do this for usually a couple minutes, sometimes less than that. And although you know there's several things that can come out of this one, the students are really surprised at the many layers of sounds that happen in a building. They also notice how quickly they can tune in to some very subtle sounds like the creaking of a chair, the scratching of a pencil on paper. But it also brings them to more of a place of stillness of calmness. And honestly, I feel like it makes them more receptive to the learning that happens after. That's a very simple mindfulness based exercise. But what would it look like if we could bring students out into nature, and have them do a similar exercise, really tuning into the many layers of sound and the natural world, it would probably calm them down, it would probably get them more receptive to learning. But would it help build connection to the natural world, and that's what I'm really interested in. Because if we can't get the human race to care about the natural world, there's no way we're going to be able to save it.
Jeff 16:10
This idea of deep listening as a means of fostering some sort of emotional connection to the natural world that we are situated within, and there's, there's a lot of research on this, there's only so far we can go with a cognitive mindset of, I understand what's happening with the world, I understand what's happening with climate change. And even that there's a lot of information and messaging, it's so important. And sometimes people can get lost in the messaging, sometimes they can get paralyzed, like this problem is too big, do my actions actually make any difference. But a lot of what we find is the folks that are really at the forefront of the movement, of protection of conservation of sustainability, during childhood had these sort of seminal moments in the natural world, and develop this emotional connection, had responses have awe had responses of wonder. And I'm just wondering now, where children's lives are so scheduled, and they're so programmed, and it's from sort of one activity to the next. And kids are losing that time, right to just have free play, to foster their wonder to foster their creativity, to ask questions about what it is that they're seeing in the world and to be in amazement of, of all the beauty of the world if they lose that, who is going to be there in the next generation to actually be at the forefront and to be pushing this movement forward of sustainability and trying to combat climate change. And I'm hearing that deep listening is a tool that we maybe should be teaching kids from a really young age.
Kimberly 17:53
I tend to agree, I think that it's a critical part of education that we're missing, we're not, you know, speaking of paying attention, we're not paying attention to that as educators generally. And I don't know if it has more to do with the way our educational system has been organized. Education has historically been, you know, the sage on the stage, and you give the information to the student and the student then gives it back to you. And then they've learned, right? But that's not what we need in an education system now. And I think that listening is one component of that equation. If, if teacher and student are in relationship with each other, in dialogue with each other, learning from each other, growing with each other. That's how positive change happens. That's how we That's how real learning happens. And deep listening is, I believe, an integral component of that equation.
Jeff 19:05
And what does the world look like in which we are all deep listeners, and we're all fostering that skill and flexing that muscle? Where does that leave us?
Kimberly 19:18
Well, I'm always a glass half full kind of person. I'm an eternal optimist. And if each and every one of us had the ability to deeply listen to each other, and to the world around us, we would actually be hearing what other people were saying, without judgment and respecting other people's opinions without judgment. And I we're living in, as you know, in such divisive times, I can't help but think that that problem would be healed. And we would be able to move progressively forward as, as humans trying to make up for all the mistakes we've made on this planet. If we could just listen to each other.
Jeff 20:12
So true. And yes, it's always nice to hear the positive half glass full perspective, because it's easy to go down the rabbit hole of negativity. I do want to close with returning to birdsong. And I'm such a big fan of Jon Young and his ideas of of nature connection and being in relationship with the natural world. And in terms of birdsong, is there a favorite of yours that you think we should really keep our ears out for and that maybe has some deep lessons or learnings to leave us?
Kimberly 20:50
I actually just finished reading a book called Sounds Wild and Broken by David Haskell. He's a biologist and author. And he refers to birdsong as a gateway drug, to deep listening, and I completely agree, and that made me chuckle when I first read it. The birds have so much to teach us about deep listening. And if we can tune our ears and tune our hearts, our souls to nature song, it seems like that's a really good way to practice listening deeply. When I listen to the birds sing, I feel connected to the earth in a way that makes me realize I'm truly inseparable from it. And I'm reminded that I exist in interdependence with all living things.
Jeff 21:49
Kimberly Post thank you so much for joining us here on the interdisciplinary investigations podcast. It's been a pleasure having you here and learning about this, this intriguing and certainly impactful art of deep listening. Thank you so much.
Kimberly 22:04
Thank you.
Jeff 22:06
Thank you for listening to the interdisciplinary investigations podcast hosted by me, Jeff Perrin. Thank you to Halfmoon Island for providing our intro and outro music. Please rate review and check out all of our episodes wherever you stream. Thanks so much.
Transcribed by https://otter.ai