Blogs
September 16, 2025
Language, Creativity, and Co-Creation in the Pedagogy of Listening: An Educator’s Critical Reflection
with support from Narda Nelson & Jamie Arnett
What does it mean to listen with children in these times? Who or what are we listening for? Prompted by these questions, my colleagues and I were asked by our pedagogist to engage with Land and Vintimilla’s book Vitalizing Vocabulary: Doing Pedagogy and Language in Early Childhood Education[1]in the lead-up to our UVic Child Care Professional Development Day in May 2025. This provocation followed a year of inquiry-led work with children that was guided by a reconsideration of what it means to live a pedagogy of listening[2]. The following blog post shares my grapplings with what it means to live a pedagogy of listening, which emerged in response to our pedagogist’s invitation. By revisiting our inquiry work documentation, the pedagogy of listening, materials, and the newly introduced Vitalizing Vocabulary, new questions emerged for me related to language, creativity and the co-creation of curriculum.
Reading the first and second chapter of Vitalizing Vocabulary alongside the British Columbia Early Learning Framework (B.C. ELF)[3] has deepened my understanding of the role of language, not just as a tool for communication, but as a powerful medium for creativity, identity and community building in early childhood education. Both texts challenge traditional, top-down pedagogies and invite educators to see dialogue as a shared and dynamic process—one that is deeply ethical and filled with possibility.
Situated dialogue, as proposed in Vitalizing Vocabulary, is more than just listening politely or prompting children to speak. It means truly being present with children, allowing their questions, thoughts and emotions to shape the direction of the conversation and the learning that unfolds from it. This approach resonates strongly with the B.C. ELF’s principle of creating inclusive spaces where children’s voices are heard and valued. It supports a pedagogy that is relational, collaborative and responsive.
When children are given this kind of space—when their words are not merely corrected or directed but are instead welcomed, extended and even challenged—they begin to see themselves as thinkers and makers of meaning. This is where creativity and self-expression flourish.
In environments that embrace situated dialogue and relational pedagogy, children learn to engage with what is available to them—materials, language, movement, images, sounds—to create and co-create worlds of understanding. They build structures with blocks and with ideas. They paint pictures and tell stories that merge imagination and experience. They negotiate, reframe and invent. This is not creativity for the sake of performance but creativity as a form of living inquiry—an ongoing process of making sense of the world and one’s place within it.
As educators, our role becomes less about delivering content and more about curating conditions where such expression is possible: listening carefully, asking open-ended questions and engaging in co-learning alongside children. It also involves recognizing the cultural and ethical dimensions of language—what we say, whose voices we privilege and how we invite others into dialogue.
In this way, Vitalizing Vocabulary helps me see language as a material of creativity in itself. It is something children engage with—not just to learn but to become, to question, to connect and to imagine new ways of being together.
In early childhood education, “listening” is often mistaken for the act of hearing children speak. Yet, listening—as both a pedagogical stance and an inquiry—is far more complex. It involves tuning in to the many languages through which children express themselves, including gesture, rhythm, silence, repetition and material engagement. When children manipulate tools such us clay, paint, blocks or natural materials, they are not simply playing, they are thinking with their hands, shaping meaning and articulating inner thoughts beyond the limits of verbal language.
Our inquiry considers the pedagogy of listening. It calls us to question how we position ourselves in relation to children’s encounters. Are we listening to respond, to interpret or to witness? What do we privilege when we focus solely on spoken words? What gets silenced?
Children mold “letters” with clay, not necessarily to demonstrate knowledge of the alphabet. Perhaps it is the allure of curves and edges or the pleasure of pressing their identity into the soft resistance of the material. Perhaps they are re-membering the shape of their name—the first symbol of belonging. Or perhaps it is none of these things. The truth may remain unknowable. And that unknowing is not a deficit but a space of possibility.
As educators, the demand is not to decode children’s every action but to attend—to stand beside their process with curiosity, humility and openness. When we listen through their creations, we listen to their bodies and their being. We witness how they think with materials, how they inquire into the world around them, how they compose meaning in nonlinear, deeply personal ways.
In this view, pedagogy is not about transmitting knowledge but about cultivating listening as a practice that opens possibilities. It is about not just hearing but receiving—with all our senses—what children offer. What matters in our pedagogies is not the certainty of interpretation but the ethical stance of listening itself.
Sources cited:
[1] Nicole Land and Cristina D. Vintimilla, Vitalizing Vocabulary: Doing Pedagogy and Language in Early Childhood Education (University of Toronto Press, 2024).
[2] Carlina Rinaldi, Making Learning Visible: Children as Individual and Group Learners (Reggio Children and Project Zero, 2001), as cited in Government of British Columbia, B.C. Early Learning Framework, 2019, https://www2.gov.bc.ca/gov/content/education-training/early-learning/teach/early-learning-framework.
[3] Government of British Columbia, B.C. Early Learning Framework, 2019, https://www2.gov.bc.ca/gov/content/education-training/early-learning/teach/early-learning-framework.